Funding sources for research are usually acknowledged by authors in their published papers, but until now there has been no practical way to collate this information from multiple publications. With funding bodies under increasing pressure to report on research outcomes and a growing number of national initiatives seeking to provide appropriate access to this research, a central solution has become necessary. The FundRef initiative from CrossRef meets this need by collecting standardized research funding data from published works and making it available for anyone to search and analyse.