I've just spent three days in Athens at the euroCRIS meeting, discussing the relationship between repositories and Current Research Information Systems. The idea behind a CRIS (plural CRIS, not CRISes) is that it forms a cross-institutional information layer that aggregates information from the library (publications), human resources (personnel and organisational structure), finance department (projects and grants), estates management (facilities and equipment) and external sources (funding programmes, citation data), and so integrates at some level with the set of services provided by a repository.
The CRIS initiative comes out of an administrative background (starting in 1991) and so predates repositories and exists tangentially to them. A CRIS is typically concerned with repository metadata (how many papers? which publishers? written by whom?) but not its data contents. So my concern was that the repository should not be sidelined or marginalised, but instead the repository should be seen as a mature partner in the aggregate of information services provided across the institution. ...
At the meeting many universities from across Europe spoke of how they were trying to make the two systems work together in one form or another. In some ways, the innovation is not technical, but simply in the concept that institutional information should not be siloed, but that it can be shared between administrative domains for the benefit of the whole institution.
On the technical side, CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) is the data sharing and interoperability standard that euroCRIS are promoting. ...
These requirements are straightforward to satisfy in EPrints ... So an EPrints repository should be able to take on a useful role within a CRIS environment ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 5/21/2009 02:23:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
