Report on EUNIS – euroCRIS joint survey on CRIS and IR

Recently it has been published the final report of the CRIS/IR survey. That was a joint initiative of EUNIS and euroCRIS.

The goal of this survey was to collect information on CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) and IR (Open Access institutional repositories) technological solutions that support Research, and to analyses their links to other systems used at Higher Education Institutions.

The authors of the final report are:

Lígia Maria Ribeiro has been Principal Researcher at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto since 2002. She was pro-rector at the University of Porto between 2006 and 2014, being responsible for ICT. Between 2004 and 2006, she was President of EUNIS, after being Vice-President for two years. She is presently a member of the EUNIS Board of Directors. 

Michele Mennielli is responsible for International Relations and Business Development at Cineca, the Italian Consortium of University. He cooperates with different international organizations to create cross-national collaborations and projects. He is Board Member and Secretary of EUNIS; Member of the DSpace Steering Group and Board Member Executive for External Relations of euroCRIS. 

Pablo de Castro works as Open Access Project Officer at LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries in The Hague. He is an expert in Open Access and research information workflows and management systems, an area he›s worked at for GrandIR Ltd and the EDINA National Data Centre in Edinburgh. MSc/BSc in Physics from UCM, he has a background as Institutional Repository manager for the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Besides being an ORCID Ambassador, Pablo is also serving on the euroCRIS Board as leader of the CRIS/IR Interoperability Task Group.

I know in person the three autors and I can say that they are great professionals with a great reputation in the research scope.

The CRIS/IR survey was launched in April 2015 and was based on a previous initiative to collect information on the CRIS and IR infrastructure available in Portugal.

The goal of the survey was want to know about:

- How these two systems interoperate?

- Which data and metadata are made available and how these are being used?

The survey was distributed via mailing lists to the scientific community and institutions. 

There was wide participation from the community, there was 84 full responses from 20 different countries.


The two main questions the Survey tried to answer were: are CRISs gradually replacing IRs? Are the two systems overlapping in their functionalities? From the results we have collected, both questions seem to get a negative answer. The two systems are clearly complementary: while IRs are the preferred choice for managing research publications and dissertations and thesis, CRISs are regularly chosen for managing the institutional research information as a whole including metadata for research papers.

Some conclusions are:

About the use:

• 62% of the institutions have both systems: CRIS and IR
• 18% uses the same software

Aboout their contents:

• CRIS systems hold a large variety of contents: metadata for research publications (81%), projects (76%), and reporting features (75%)
• IR stores mainly metadata and full-text for publication (96%), dissertations and thesis (86%).
• DSPACE is the most used software for IR (56%) 

About the interoperability:

• Almost 65% of the institutions have linked their CRIS&IR (so, there are closely related)
• CRIS is also the product which links with legacy systems, such finances or HR
• There are little integration between LMS (Learning management systems) and CRIS o IR.

Another important aspect the survey collected information on was the management of CRISs systems. This will usually vary from one institution to the next, but the conclusion is that Libraries and the Research & Innovation or Research & Development units have a prominent role on the different aspects of CRIS management.

As a key conclusion, both CRISs and IRs are considered valuable tools to support Institutions in the research assessment exercises for both university and author evaluation.

You can access to the final report here.