Research funding badges

[jcohen02]

Not sure if this is slightly out of scope for this repository but it seems like it could be the right place to raise this.

I'd like to propose the idea of using badges on GitHub/GitLab repositories to highlight research funding support for projects.

The example I was thinking to use is:

In this example, the right hand side of the badge links to the EPSRC website but in the example I tested in relation to one of my own repositories, the badge looked as above but the right hand side links directly to the grant page.

Why? Badges provide a great way to offer a concise, consistent approach to displaying information on repositories. This should (although I'm not quite sure how yet) provide a better, more consistent means of highlighting and identifying projects that have resulted from research funding.

How? Using a service such as shields.io you can simply add a URL into the README file in your repository to have the badge generated and displayed.

Challenges:

• Ensuring consistency - we'd need to prepare a simple spec that defines exactly what a badge should state and where (if anywhere) each side of the badge should link.
• Having the two words "research funding" on the badge slightly goes against the badge spec which states that they should be concise with the left-hand-side containing 1 descriptive word. Does this matter? It's still pretty clear. Maybe it should say "ResearchFunding"? Or just "funding"?
• Should the right side contain a grant ID instead of the funder? If the information in the badge can be used to capture metadata and statistics then having the funder's name there and a link to the grant page might be better?

Questions:

• How much use is this in reality? If we're simply using shields.io to embed a badge in a repository, does this provide any use? Is the information any easier to identify?