CRIS and persistent identifiers: how do they work together?

Abstract

The scope of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) has expanded over the years, as have the standards and technologies to support them. From being conceived mainly as internal systems for research management, the emphasis has shifted to interoperability and combining data from diverse sources. Technological developments have enabled this expansion, but a particular driver has been the trend to open science on a global scale, with transparent access to the artefacts of the research process made available for examination and reuse. The growth in repositories of publications and datasets has fuelled both the need and the opportunity for facilitating the research process through locating and making reusable these artefacts, which requires models, techniques and tools capable of handling the necessary connections at scale. (See https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm for the European Commission’s view on implementation of Open Science),

The view of the CERIF standard, underpinning many CRISs, reflects this evolution: ‘Today CERIF is used as a model for implementation of a standalone CRIS (but interoperation ready), as a model to define the wrapper around a legacy non-CERIF CRIS to allow homogeneous access to heterogeneous systems and as a definition of a data exchange format to create a common data warehouse from several CRIS.’ (euroCRIS, ‘Main features of CERIF’)

In parallel, another development has been taking place: the growth of persistent identifiers for a wide range of entities in the research domain, both in the digital and physical worlds. DOIs for publications and datasets and ORCID ids for individual researchers are now securely established, indeed indispensable parts of the research landscape, with their key features of being resolvable and having associated metadata. Taking the idea of PIDs to an extreme is the ‘Global Digital Object Cloud’ (RDA Data Fabric Interest Group, ‘Global Digital Object Cloud (DOC) - A Guiding Vision’), putting (virtualised) digital objects centre-stage and giving PIDs a crucial role in accessing and managing them.