We're excited to share a transformative leap forward for OpenScholar with the introduction of OS Match, a new AI-powered funding discovery solution built to help researchers spend less time searching and more time pursuing the work that drives the world forward.

OpenScholar has always focused on making research more visible, accessible, and connected through powerful web infrastructure. With OS Match, we're taking the next major step in that mission: bringing intelligence directly into the funding discovery process and removing one of the biggest barriers researchers face in advancing their work. 

Why We Built OS Match

The funding landscape is noisy, fragmented, and challenging to navigate, compounded by the growing instability of federal funding. Researchers often spend countless hours combing through funding lists that rarely reflect the depth or specificity of their work. At the same time, research offices and administrators are tasked with supporting faculty across disciplines—often without tools designed to match opportunities to the nuanced expertise of each scholar. 

This is where OS Match comes in. It handles the searching for you, filters out irrelevant results, and delivers precisely matched opportunities in a simple, automated report, giving researchers a clear path to the opportunities that matter most. 

What OS Match Does

OS Match is a proprietary AI-driven tool that scans global funding sources and analyzes your web presence—your website, publications, keywords, and related metadata—to automatically identify high-match funding opportunities tailored to your work.

No more generic alerts.

No more scanning hundreds of listings.

No more guesswork.

Instead, OS Match delivers relevant, high-confidence matches directly to researchers and research offices, helping teams discover opportunities aligned with their expertise, active projects, and research trajectory.

How It Works

OS Match is powered by OpenScholar’s proprietary matching methodology. It works in three key steps:

1. Understand the Research

Through a deep analysis of a researcher’s complete digital presence—pulling together publications, keywords, collaborators, and core areas of inquiry—OS Match transforms this information into structured data that clearly reflects their full research landscape.

2. Analyze Funding Opportunities

OS Match constantly analyzes the global, diversified landscape of governmental and non-governmental funding sources, distilling themes, requirements, disciplines, eligibility details, and key terminology.

3. Generate High-Match Results

The system compares both sets of information and surfaces strong matches based on research relevance rather than broad categories or manual filtering.

Each month, researchers receive a curated set of top funding opportunities automatically, complete with details, relevancy, and links to apply.

And while OS Match is fully integrated with OS Web and available for all existing customers, it is available to anyone on or off of the OpenScholar platform. That means any researcher can begin effortlessly discovering funding based on their online presence, regardless of whether it’s built using OpenScholar.

Why OS Match Matters for the Research Ecosystem

The research landscape is more competitive and more complex than ever. Funding cycles are accelerating. The volume of opportunities is growing. And the pressure to secure grants—especially early-career and interdisciplinary ones—is mounting.

OS Match directly addresses these challenges:

• Automates funding discovery by continuously scanning diversified governmental and non-governmental sources.
• Expands equitable access to high-quality funding insights across all career stages.
• Delivers curated, high-relevance matches instead of generic alerts or overwhelming inboxes.
• Supports interdisciplinary research through smarter, cross-domain discovery.
• Broadens visibility to include NGOs, foundations, philanthropies, and international funders.
• Boosts institutional competitiveness for major grants and awards.
• Ensures consistent, unbiased matching based on real research outputs—not keywords.

This is not just a new feature at OpenScholar. It’s a meaningful step toward a more intelligent, supportive, and accessible research environment.

What’s Next

With the launch of OS Match, OpenScholar is not only a place where research is showcased—but also a place where research can grow. We’re working toward creating a fully connected research ecosystem where scholars network and opportunities flow together seamlessly through scholar profiles, research outputs, data, and insights.

OS Match is available now for OpenScholar institutions. Over the coming months, we’ll continue expanding coverage, enhancing the matching engine, and introducing new insights that help researchers make even more informed funding decisions.

We’re excited to bring this capability to our community—and even more excited to see the discoveries, collaborations, and breakthroughs it helps enable.

If you’re ready to help your researchers focus on the work that moves discovery forward, we’re here to help. Contact our team to learn how OS Match can accelerate opportunity discovery across your institution.