Repositories for research information management

Wolfram Horstmann

CERIF-CRIS and Repositories, Brussels, 12/13-oct-2011

The challenge

Collaboration of researchers, administration & librarians!

http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=33681

Why CRIS & OA-Repositories?

“Given their affinity, achieving interoperability between CRIS and OAR is desirable and will benefit

all parties involved, including the researchers. A joint approach will avoid double input and management of redundant data as well as

redundant services and processes and will both enhance the efficiency and quality (mutual enrichment) of the services offered by CRIS and OAR to their users.”

January 2007: Knowledge Exchange DEFF, DFG, JISC, SURF

Exchanging Research Information -- Razum, Simons & Horstmann [>> Text]

The Task• There is still an assumed

competition between CRIS and OARs and many other institutional systems

• CRIS and OARs should join forces to deliver the best possible services

• An account of „Who does what and how?“ should be developed

Delineation: Characteristics• Current Research Information Systems

CRIS

– administrative, sensitive, comprehensive, integrative, local, analytic | administrators

• Open Access Repositories OAR

– public, file-centric, rights, preservation, globally distributed paradigm | librarians

• Bibliography Management System BMS

– CV oriented, complete, representative | researchers

Delineation: Commonalities• Bibliographic Information– Title, Source, Subject, Keywords,

Rights, Authorship…• Affiliation– Author Identity, Institute,

Organisational Unit, Research Group, Time Frame…

• Project Information “short-term affiliation“

– Time Frame, Funder, Participants, Budgets…

Delineation: Differences• CRIS more local, while OARs

distributed• CRIS: Financial information– Budgets of projects, staff

• CRIS: Staff information– Employment details, costs

• OAR: Full-Text Management– Access Rights, Identifiers, Preservation,

Compound Objects / Research Data …

System Habitat• CRIS and OAR potentially

– Financial System– Human Resource Management– Facility Management System– Campus Management System– Bibliographic Databases

• WoS, Scopus, ArXiV, PMC, IRs/BASE– Authoritative Data Resources /Disambiguation

• Vocabularies, Ontologies, ORCID/AuthorClaim• Massive common interoperability

requirements

‚Species‘• CRIS proper– CERIF-centric: self or METIS, PURE, CONVERIS– Integrating with institutional HRM, project &

financial systems• OAR proper– DCES , MODS etc | DSPACE, E-Prints, Fedora

• BMS intermediates– Proprietary, MODS: DSPACE, E-Prints, Invenio,

LUP, etc.• Aggregative Approaches– Sharing and re-using resources

A CRIS

AVEDAS AG, CONVERIS SYSTEM

An OAR

ePrints Southhampton

Further Trends in OARs• Extension towards BMS / Reporting– Demand for authoritative resources increases–Usage of vocabularies, ontologies, e.g. SPAR–Usage of web services, linked data– Personal displays, CV-Systems

• Extension towards Research Data– Demand for collaboration with researchers

incresases• Repositories as embedded systems– local and global integration

Research Data & Enhanced Publications

http://www.ukpmc.co.uk

Semantic Web Approaches

OpenAIRE and KE CRIS-OAR Interoperability Project

Interim Conclusion• Neither CRIS nor OARs are

autonomous– Rather open, interrelated data mgmt.

systems• Any individual solution will be different– Depending on the local system habitat

• Systems level not the correct approach?– Rather consider human curation

responsibilities

Curation processes• Persons– e.g. Human resource office, IT department

(IDM)• Finance– e.g. Finance office

• Units– e.g. Facility/Campus Management

• Projects – e.g. Research office, Researchers

• Bibliographic Information– e.g. Library, Researchers

The curation view on CRIS & OARs

• Treatment of systems as curation tools maintained by specialists– Research project manager, financial officer, staff

manager, bibliography specialist, data librarian, web content manager, identity manager, analyst

• No requirement to build integrated IT-‚columns‘– Rather distributed systems view– Reporting as distributed queries with display– Data model may differ in systems, while entities,

properties and vocabularies are aligned to interoperate on the aggregation/reporting level

Conclusion• Convergence between CRIS and OAR – both head towards aggregative systems– OARs become ‚sensitive‘ e.g. Bibliometrics,

Research Data

– CRIS become public e.g. CV displays, full-text

• Differences there to stay– Administrators as end-users for CRIS– Open Access as committment for OARs

• Research Information Repository / ‚CRISpository‘ already a reality

Recommendations• Put the researcher in the centre

– CRIS & OARs have joint responsibility to serve research – Even assessment exercises will only be accepted if the

researchers agree on the approach taken– Researchers are not interested in technicalities

• Regard CRIS and OARs as assemblies of specialized data curation activities – Everybody should keep on doing what he/she can do

best– Systems and formats are slave to curation requirements– Inter-departmental collaboration is the clue (and main

challenge)– Codex: Nobody will take away responsibility of the other

And yes…

…CERIF will be the common demoninator

Thanks!