OCLC-euroCRIS Joint Survey of Research Information Management Practices

Abstract

The scholarly communications ecosystem has experienced rapid change in recent years, driven by political, technological, and network influences. Cultural changes usually have strong technological implications and the research and scholarly ecosystem is not an exception. Additionally, the research domain has a great variety of stakeholders using different tools and software to manage complex and diverse tasks, activities and workflows, such as collecting data on publications; supporting researchers in their daily activities; satisfying requirements of funding agencies; granting access to data and publications; enhancing visibility and strengthening national and international collaborations.

An attempt to understand and analyze the ecosystem was led by euroCRIS and EUNIS in 2016. The two European Organizations launched a survey focused on the use of Current Research Information System (CRIS) and Institutional Repository (IR) among European universities and research institutes, and their level of technological interoperability. More recently, euroCRIS has partnered with OCLC Research to conduct a survey of research information management practices at universities and research institutes worldwide.

The OCLC-euroCRIS survey is intended to inform the research community about the goals, purposes, and scope of research information management practices, including the creation of institutional registries of research outputs, awards/grants management, academic activity reporting workflows, as well as publicly available researcher expertise profiles. It will tell us more about how institutions are currently addressing the challenges and complexities related to research information management, and it will also provide valuable insights into national and regional practices.

We are particularly interested in examining differing stakeholder roles within the research information management ecosystem, knowledge that can help lead to more efficient workflows, adoption of standards, and interoperability.

In this presentation, we will share the outcomes of the analysis conducted in 2016 and we will provide a progress report on the global survey, which is expected to launch in late 2017.