Flanders Research Information Space: an indispensable regional CRIS system to efficiently monitor progress in open science

Abstract

In 2019, the Flemish government launched an ambitious Open Science policy outlining five key perfomance indicators to measure progress towards open science. It was decided to monitor these KPIs via Flanders Research Information Space (FRIS), the research portal of the Flemish government (www.researchportal.be).The FRIS portal operates with a knowledge model in which data objects related to research output (researchers, projects, publications etc.) are interlinked and described by metadata standards. These semantically defined metadata standards are developed and implemented in mutual agreement. The research performing and funding institutions deliver metadata on research information (persons, organizations, projects, publications, etc.) in real-time directly to FRIS via CERIF-XML (Common European Research Information Format) via their institutional repositories. This allows to link and enrich information about research data with other research outputs. This is unique in Europe and makes FRIS eminently suitable to use reliable metrics in order to monitor the Open Science indicators.