OpenAIRE compatibility for CRIS systems: recent progress

Abstract

Several contributions on the implementation of the OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers have been presented at previous CRIS conferences, both in St Andrews in 2016 and in Rome in 2014. However, by the start of 2018, the number of CRIS systems included on the list of OpenAIRE data providers was still zero. One key reason for such a slow progress in the implementation of this key step in the area of system interoperability has been the development of an updated version of the CERIF-XML-based OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers that has taken place in the meantime in order to enable a smoother and more effective information exchange process.

With the early 2018 awarding of funding to the euroCRIS METIS2OpenAIRE project proposal by OpenAIRE, this stalemate position should start to quickly evolve towards a far more interoperable landscape with an increasing number of CRIS systems registered as OpenAIRE data providers. METIS2OpenAIRE aimed to ensure OpenAIRE compatibility for a first institutional research information management system, namely METIS at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. With a three-and-a-half-month project lifetime, METIS2OpenAIRE set out not just to test the implementation of version 1.1 of the OpenAIRE Guidelines on a specific institutional system, but also to support a number of parallel implementations by external, budget-neutral stakeholders that would ensure a widespread adoption of the newly released CRIS interoperability standard. This were PURE, the single most widely adopted CRIS platform worldwide, and OMEGA-PSIR, a widespread CRIS solution in Poland.