Sigma CRIS: Scientific outputs, integration and interoperability

Abstract

Society increasingly demands a quick, easy and homogeneous access to the information. Access to Internet, mobile devices, social networks as Facebook or ResearchGate, which create links between people to share data reaching anywhere in the world within seconds or the increase commitment for the cloud, where access from any device and place allowing the access to the own documents, videos, photos, music, etc. keeping the own customized environment or applications to share documents as Google Drive or Dropbox, which allows to agile data access are examples of agility in the flow of information and is something that nowadays is needed and is no longer questioned.

This paradigm transferred in the scope of research, knowing that universities, their affiliated research centers and researchers have the aim on spending time doing research, getting funds for their research or teaching and the moment to feel the need to transfer or enter the results into an information system that do not report short-term progress or improvement in their day to day of research never arrives. Faced with this situation takes more relevance offer systems that provide the flexibility and immediacy of access to scientific publications generated. In this regard already exists commercial databases as Web Of Science, PubMed, Dialnet, Scopus, Google Scholar, etc. that provides it.

On the other hand, SIGMA Gestión Universitaria, which is a not-for-profit consortium established in 1996 by a group of 8 top level Spanish Public Universities to provide technological solutions to their needs for managing academic, learning, research and organization processes aligning its SIGMA CRIS Solution with the ERA requirements. SIGMA and their universities have made great efforts to promote competitiveness, mobility, create synergies and improve the research quality in-house, regionally, nationally and internationally. This has allowed great progress in all areas, researcher’s mobility, creating synergies with shared resource centers between different institutions and improving the research visibility generated.

In line of what has been said, SIGMA is making a major effort to focus its research solution in the current demands of the research community. These efforts have focused on three main areas of development: improving the usability of the solution that the researcher uses to update their scientific production, automatic interoperability with commercial scientific databases and the image adaptation to standards quality that currently defines the market for web applications.