State of the Art and Roadmap for Current Research Information Systems and Repositories: White Paper

Abstract

Various pressures bring CRIS and repositories together. In many countries evaluation of research is becoming important, to assure public funds are well-spent. Such requirements need to associate research output (including publications but also products, patents, dissemination at events) with persons, organizational units (university, faculty, department, cross-department centre, research group), projects (e.g. funded grants), facilities (e.g. large synchrotron radiation sources), equipment (particular experiment) for analysis. Repository systems usually do not collect this contextual information, being restricted to scholarly publication output with title, abstract, author and some other publication-related information, commonly based on DC (Dublin Core) metadata. On the other hand, some CRIS include within them the research outputs as objects (e.g. publications). Similarly, the context of a research output is important in evaluating its utility, quality and relevance to any repurposing. Context is usually recorded in a CRIS. CERIF provides an appropriate timestamped structure so that provenance information is also available.