Repository and CRIS interoperability issues within a 'connector lite' environment

Abstract

Repositories continue to be systems designed principally for gathering, disseminating and preserving the intellectual output of research institutions and, in so doing, fulfilling the goals of Open Access (OA), generating global visibility for institutional research and collecting institutional research content in a single digital location. A CRIS, by contrast, tends to be more holistic in the nature of the information and data it is designed to curate; providing a comprehensive overview of contemporaneous institutional research activity by drawing together information from a number of disparate research-relevant sources, thus enabling improved administrative processes within research-intensive organisations. The differing functions of both systems is the pretext for many of the interoperability issues which now impede efforts to improve integration, data sharing, etc. between CRIS platforms and repositories.

The purpose of this contribution is therefore to present the repository and CRIS configuration used at the University of Strathclyde, specifically the parallel operation of both EPrints and Pure. The contribution will review the technologies used and explore the technical obstacles which impedes greater technical interoperability, as well as some of the workarounds which have been deployed to improve integration and funder compliance. The use of a so-called ‘connector-lite’ approach to servicing the differing technical requirements of the repository will also be described.