The gradual merging of repository and CRIS solutions to meet institutional research information management requirements

Abstract

Much has been said in recent times about the alleged dichotomy between Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Current Research Information Systems (CRISs). According to this highly ideological argument, IRs would be the platforms to support the noncommercial initiative jointly carried out by HEIs – and specifically their Libraries – in order to freely disseminate their research outputs, whereas CRISs would support the whole institutional research information management (RIM) with special emphasis on projects and funding. RIM being an activity oriented towards reporting for research assessment exercises and thus tightly connected to the institutional funding, the support from the Management at HEIs for CRIS implementation and operation and for the Research Office traditionally in charge of such tasks would be much higher than for the much less relevant IR. Moreover, the awareness of researchers and scholars towards such platforms will usually be much higher for the CRIS – from whose accurate and complete depiction of their research activity their salaries will ultimately depend – and it won't be unusual to collect complaints on the need to ensure that both systems are simultaneously fed with the appropriate, often duplicated information. According to this conception, it is often hard to get the institutional Research Office and Library to work together for improving the end-user experience by enhancing their system interoperability.

While much of this may still be happening at a number of HEIs, the general landscape is swiftly evolving and it's not that accurate anymore to describe the RIM system configuration at institutions in such oversimplified terms. CRIS/IR interoperability is now a fairly widespread feature that will allow both platforms to efficiently exchange information and reinforce each other's features, and especially the borders between what each of these platforms is and does are becoming increasingly blurred. Commercial CRISs are gradually becoming compliant with the OAI-PMH protocol and thus becoming able to offer institutions an integrated repository functionality, while the main open source IR platforms have now developed extended data models that will allow them to deliver features traditionally associated to CRISs such as project and funding management, hence becoming suitable solutions for research institutions where purchasing or developing a highly-sophisticated CRIS is not a top priority.

This paper aims to describe the areas where CRIS/IR interoperability is taking place, and will provide a set of use cases for institutional research information system configuration involving IRs, CRISs and a combination of both. These will show how both systems are now increasingly merging for best serving institutions and their researchers.