About ECRcentral

Our Mission

ECRcentral exists to make it easier for early career researchers — PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior faculty — to discover funding opportunities, travel grants, and professional development resources.

Finding research funding is hard. Information is scattered across hundreds of funder websites, institutional pages, and social media posts. ECRcentral aggregates this information into a single, searchable, filterable directory that anyone can use for free.

We believe open science starts with open infrastructure. ECRcentral is fully open source, community-maintained, and has no commercial interests.

What We Cover

History

ECRcentral is a community-driven initiative started by eLife Ambassadors in 2018. The eLife Ambassador program supports the development of new initiatives ranging from preprints, reproducibility, and funding, by facilitating local discussions and connecting communities with international developments.

The concept of a centralised, searchable ECR funding database was conceived and initiated by eLife Ambassador Aziz Khan, who also built and launched the initial platform. The initial idea was further shaped by former eLife ECAG member Sonia Sen. Naomi Penfold and Gary McDowell were instrumental in shaping ideas at the initial stages. The initial fellowship funding list was curated and edited by Dieter Lukas (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) and eLife Ambassador Juan Quintana (Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research, University of Dundee). At launch, ECRcentral also integrated a funding list from Johns Hopkins University and opportunities submitted via a community Google form. The initial travel grant list was curated by Lotte de Winde, eLife Ambassador 2018 and member of eLife ECAG.

ECRcentral aims to bring early career researchers together to discuss funding opportunities, share experiences, and create impact through community engagement. The platform is built entirely on open-source technology, with all source code and documentation publicly available. The current static site, also built and maintained by Aziz Khan, is hosted on GitHub Pages.

The ECRcentral logo was designed by Anne Martin, a postdoc at the University of Oregon.

Hosting & Infrastructure

From its launch until March 2026, ECRcentral was hosted on AWS, with infrastructure costs generously covered by eLife Sciences. In March 2026 the platform was migrated to GitHub Pages — a fully static, zero-cost hosting solution that aligns with the project's open-source principles. The domain ecrcentral.org has been registered and paid for by Aziz Khan since the platform's inception.

How It Works

ECRcentral is a static website — there is no database server, no login system, and no backend infrastructure. This keeps it fast, cheap to host, and easy to maintain.

All data is stored as YAML files in a public GitHub repository:

• Each funding opportunity, travel grant, resource, and funder has its own .yaml file.
• When a pull request is merged or an issue is processed, a Python build script converts the YAML files into JSON.
• Astro reads those JSON files at build time and generates static HTML pages.
• The static site is deployed to GitHub Pages — no servers, no costs.
• Client-side JavaScript handles filtering, searching, and sorting without a backend.

This architecture means ECRcentral can scale to hundreds of thousands of entries without any infrastructure costs.

Editorial Policy

ECRcentral aims to be inclusive — we list opportunities for researchers at all career stages, in all disciplines, and in all countries.

We do not endorse any specific funder, program, or institution. All entries are descriptive, not prescriptive — we describe what is offered, not whether it is good value.

All entries go through a community review before being published. Reviewers check:

• That the entry points to a real, legitimate opportunity
• That the URL is correct and accessible
• That the information is accurate based on the official source
• That the entry is not a duplicate

If you find an error, please use the "Report an issue" link on any entry page, or open a GitHub issue directly.

Technology Stack

License

ECRcentral is open source, released under the MIT License. The data (YAML files and generated JSON) is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license. You are free to use, share, and adapt the data with attribution.

Contact & Community

ECRcentral is maintained by volunteers. The best way to get in touch is through GitHub: