Final Report: EUNIS - EUROCRIS Joint Survey on CRIS and IR

FINAL REPORT EUNIS – EUROCRIS JOINT SURVEY ON CRIS AND IR AUTHORS Ligia Ribeiro Pablo de Castro Michele Mennielli Published under CC-BY International 4.0 TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary Introduction Survey results CRIS System features IR Technologies Open access policies and mandates Use of systems other then IR to store research outputs Content types stored in CRISs and IRs IR Interoperability Openaire and ORCID compliance IR Institutional or author evaluation compliance 4 6 9 12 15 16 16 17 18 19 20 2FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative An ERAI Report. March 2016 Figure 1 Geographic distribution of respondents Figure 2 CRIS, IR and CRIS & IR usage Figure 3 Same CRIS and IR platform Figure 4 Same platform for CRIS & IR Figure 5 CRIS providers Figure 6 CRIS & IR year of operation Figure 7 CRIS main functionalities Figure 8 Links to internal systems Figure 9 Links to external systems Figure 10 Protocols, standards and vocabularies Figure 11 CRIS management Figure 12 IR platforms Figure 13 OA policies and mandates Figure 14 IR type of contents Figure 15 CRIS/IR type of contents Figure 16 IR links to other institutional services Figure 17 CRIS/IR links to internal systems Figure 18 OpenAIRE and ORCID compliance Figure 19 CRIS/IR ORCID adoption Figure 20 IR Institutional or Author Evaluation Figure 21 CRIS/IR usage for institutional or author evaluation TABLE OF FIGURES 3 FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY An ERAI Report. March 2016 ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative The CRIS/IR Survey is a joint collaboration between EUNIS and euroCris. The report is published through ERAI (Eunis Research and Analysis Initiative). ERAI is an applied research project to describe and disseminate work being done in european Higher Education IT ISSN: 2409-1340 ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative 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 Permission is granted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License to replicate, copy, distribute, transmit, or adapt this report freely provided that attribution is provided as illustrated in the citation below. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 4FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative An ERAI Report. March 2016 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The rising strategic importance of Current Research Information Systems (CRISs) and Institutional Repositories (IRs) for higher education and research institutions relates to the need to foster research and innovation and to provide a faster and broader technology transfer to industry and society. These are critical factors for global competitiveness, and the increasing competition among institutions to increase and disseminate excellence in research is another area where these systems provide a key contribution. Additional important elements with a strong impact on such strategic evolution are the new policies on Open Access, National Research Assessment and Research Funding. It is indeed from 2003 onwards that the increase in the number of repositories becomes apparent, together with the rise of the Open Access movement, as well as from 2010 on when new policies started to be implemented which affected the adoption of CRIS systems: %83 of the respondents stated that they are following Open Access policies within their own institutions. Today we see CRISs acting as repositories, repositories with extended data models, a wide range of interoperability features between co-existing CRISs and repositories and even a new species in the ecosystem that claims to be both a repository and a CRIS. The scope of this EUNIS and euroCRIS joint initiative, the CRIS/IR survey, was to collect information on CRIS and IR technological solutions that support Research and to analyse their links to other systems used at Higher Education Institutions: how they interoperate, which data and metadata are made available and how these are being used. The CRIS/IR survey, which was launched in April 2015, was based on a previous initiative to collect information on the CRIS and IR infrastructure available in Portugal. The survey was distributed by EUNIS and euroCRIS via a number of national and international mailing lists and was open until mid-September 2015. There was wide participation from the community, and we collected 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. Through the analysis of the collected results we can observe that %62 of the surveyed institutions have both a CRIS and an IR and that %18 of them use the same software application. From the answers obtained, it is also clear that the range of databases, programming languages and frameworks used is very wide, with Oracle and MySQL as preferred databases and Java as the most frequently chosen programming language CRIS systems hold a large variety of contents, the most common being metadata for research publications (%81), projects (%76) and reporting features (%75). Not surprisingly IRs mainly store both metadata and fulltext for publications (%96) and dissertations and thesis (%86). Among the available repository solutions, DSpace is the most frequently adopted one, being used in %56 of the cases. 5 FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY An ERAI Report. March 2016 ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative 86 Respondents 20 countries Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo When analysing the interoperability aspects and the links between CRISs, IRs and external systems we noticed that: (i) almost %65 of the institutions have linked their CRIS and their IR, so both platforms are perceived to be closely related; (ii) when it comes to interoperability with legacy systems such as Finance and HR, CRISs are the preferred system to link to because of the data and information contained in them; (iii) there is still very little integration between Learning Management Systems and either CRISs or IRs. The analysis also showed that the most frequently adopted standards and protocols are the OAI-PMH protocol (%50), the CERIF format (%41) and ORCID (%32). 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 we observed that Libraries and the Research & Innovation or Research & Development units have a prominent role on the different aspects of CRIS management. A key conclusion of the replies we have collected to the survey is that both CRISs and IRs are considered valuable tools to support Institutions in the research assessment exercises for both university and author evaluation. 6FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative An ERAI Report. March 2016 86 Respondents INTRODUCTION Within the framework of a Partnership Agreement signed in 2014, EUNIS, the European University Information Systems Organization (www.eunis.org), and euroCRIS, the European Organization for International Research Information (www. eurocris.org) launched a joint survey aiming to collect as much data as possible on the information systems currently in use in Europe to support the Research Area. Current Research Information Systems (CRISs) and Institutional Repositories (IRs) are two main components of the Research Information Management realm. The rising strategic importance of CRISs and IRs for higher education and research institutions is linked to the need of fostering research and innovation. Providing faster and broader technology transfer to industry and society – a critical factor for global competitiveness – and supporting the increasing competition across institutions to increase and communicate excellence in research are additional relevant factors. This survey aimed to ascertain how institutions through European countries are using their CRISs and IRs. For the context of the survey the definition of a CRIS given by euroCRIS was adopted: a Current Research Information System, commonly known as “CRIS”, is any informational tool dedicated to provide access to and disseminate research information. A CRIS consists of a data model describing objects of interest to R&D and a tool or set of tools to manage the data. CRISs implemented at European institutions are very often based on the CERIF data model (CERIF: Common European Research Information Format), meaning their data model architecture is both standard and interoperable. CERIF is the standard recommended by the European Commission to all EU Member States and it is supported, maintained and promoted by euroCRIS. For IRs the following definition was adopted: an Institutional Repository commonly denoted by “IR”, is a digital collection of research outputs (mainly publications and datasets) aiming to collect, preserve and disseminate the intellectual output of a higher education or research institution. Both the CRIS and repository communities have grown remarkably during these last few years. The systems’ features have gradually been extended and their role within the institutions is permanently evolving as an answer to new policies on Open Access, National Assessment and Research Funding. As a result of this evolution, we often see now CRISs acting as repositories, CRIS-like repositories with extended data models, a wide range of interoperability features between co-existing CRISs and repositories and even a new species in the ecosystem that claims to be both a repository and a CRIS. The scope of this joint EUNIS and euroCRIS CRIS/IR survey, was to collect information on CRIS and IR technical solutions that support Research and to analyse their relations with other systems used within Higher Education Institutions: how they interoperate, which data and metadata are available and how they are used. 7 FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY An ERAI Report. March 2016 ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative THE CRIS/IR SURVEY SURVEY STRUCTURE The survey was structured in two main sections. The first of them aimed to collect a picture of the present CRIS implementation level at universities and research centres in Europe. The second section addressed IR systems. The survey contained a rather comprehensive set of questions both for CRISs and IRs. Not every question was aimed to be applicable to every available system, since only the most advanced systems would be able to cover all the analyzed areas. The key questions to be answered for collecting the picture of CRIS and IR implementations were subsequently marked as mandatory, while the other ones could be left blank where not applicable. In order to collect as wide an insight as possible, the survey addressed both fully operational systems and those under implementation or even under design, asking respondents to specify at which stage of implementation their systems were and allowing them to provide information that would not be made public. A checkbox was thus included at the end of the survey for those institutions willing to appear on the euroCRIS Directory of Institutional Research Systems (DRIS, http://dspacecris.eurocris.org/simple-search?query =&location=crisdris) to specifically agree with sharing the information they were providing. The core structure of the survey is presented in Annex A of this report. Both parts of the survey should ideally be filled in by a single institutional representative. However, the potential need to involve more than one institutional representative was taken into consideration. The survey results are presented in the following sections. The CRIS/IR survey was prepared by a joint EUNIS and euroCRIS team including Lígia Ribeiro (EUNIS), Michelle Mennielli (EUNIS and euroCRIS), and Pablo de Castro (euroCRIS) based on a previous collaboration between FCT/FCCN, University of Porto (www.up.pt) and euroCRIS for carrying out a Portuguese CRIS .survey in 2013 The free open source software survey tool LimeSurvey was used to support this CRIS/IR survey, which was available at https:// inqueritos.up.pt/limesurvey/index.php/727886/lang-en, be- .tween 7th April and 14th September 2015 The survey was announced via email to EUNIS and euroCRIS members, and further distributed via local mailing lists to members of national associations like AMUE (Agence de Mutualisation des Universités et Établissements, www.amue. fr) in France, SURF (www.surf.nl) in the Netherlands, CINECA (www.cineca.it) in Italy and FCT/FCCN (National Foundation for Science and Technology/ Foundation for National Scientific Computation, www.fccn.pt) in Portugal. It was also announced .on the websites of both EUNIS and euroCRIS The preliminary results of the CRIS/IR survey were presented in June 2015 at the 21st Annual EUNIS Congress “The Journey to Discovery” at Abertay University in Dundee, UK, http://www. eunis.org/eunis2015/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/06/ Parallel-2-Track-4-Paper-87-Surveying-CRISs-and-IRs-across- .Europe.pdf 8FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative An ERAI Report. March 2016 SURVEY RESULTS GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF THE COLLECTED ANSWERS The participation of the community in the CRIS/IR survey was remarkably successful. The number of views, which was monitored from the survey platform, was around one thousand, with a tenth of them leading to submitted answers. This provides evidence of the interest arisen by the initiative and makes the survey results significant. The responses considered for analysis amounted to 84, arriving from 20 different countries. As the survey was designed for European institutions, answers collected from countries outside Europe such as Colombia were not included in the analysis. Likewise, answers arrived from organizations other than higher education or research institutions, e.g. international projects such as EPOS (European Plate Observing System) were not taken into account either. For the purpose of the analysis it was also kept in mind that institutions already included in the euroCRIS DRIS Directory could disregard the survey, even if some of them actually provided updated information. The same applies to Portuguese institutions that had already answered the previous 2013 survey that led to the current one. The geographic distribution of the survey answers is shown on Figure 1 below. The number of institutions that provided their information from Norway, Italy, France, Finland, the United Kingdom and Portugal were all above average. The average time these institutions took to fill in the survey was 48 minutes, with an average of 17 minutes for Section I on CRIS systems and 27 minutes for Section II on institutional repositories. The remaining time was used for the institution identification and for finishing the survey. TABLE1: GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONDENTS 0 5 10 15 20 uksksersptnonlitiegrfrfiesdkdeczchbgbeat 16 6 2 1 3 1 2 1 10 4 2 3 11 11 3 1 1 7 8 9 FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY An ERAI Report. March 2016 ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative OPEN ACCESS POLICIES AND MANDATES Open Access policies are common among the survey respondents, with %83 positive answers. The number of mandates is significantly lower (%26), with some institutions mentioning having both types of principles. FIGURE 13 OA POLICIES AND MANDATES OA Mandate OA Policy 26% 84% 33 survey respondents answered affirmatively when asked about the use of other systems besides the institutional repository to store research outputs. The most frequently mentioned additional systems were CRIS systems, specific systems for patents and thesis and national repositories. Other repositories – mostly disciplinespecific ones – are sometimes used mainly at departmental or laboratory level. Research data and research reports were very rarely mentioned to be stored in specific systems. USE OF SYSTEMS OTHER THAN IRs TO STORE RESEARCH OUTPUTS 16 FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative An ERAI Report. March 2016 CONTENT TYPES STORED IN CRISs AND IRs FIGURE 14 TYPE OF CONTENTS STORED IN IRs FIGURE 15 TYPE OF CONTENTS STORED IN CRISs AND IRs Not surprisingly IRs store mainly research publications (%96) and dissertations and thesis (%86). Learning objects and datasets are less common, with %22 and %18 positive answers among the respondents, as shown on Figure 14. Other content types were also mentioned, such as grey literature, artistic, cultural and multimedia works and patents, as well as – but less frequently – professional and research lectures, blog entries, grants, institutional documents, OERs, and software. A comparison between the content types stored in CRISs and IRs is shown in Figure 15. This graph provides answers to two of the most pressing questions raised in the last few years, namely whether CRISs are replacing IRs and whether or not the two systems overlap in their functionalities. Both questions seem to get a negative answer. The two systems are clearly complementary: while IRs are the preferred ones for managing full-text publications and dissertations and thesis, CRISs are regularly chosen for managing all the institutional research information data, also including metadata for research publications. It is worth noticing that datasets are managed in a still very small percentage of institutions and that the only entity that sees a certain overlapping is dissertations and thesis. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 Learning Objects Dissertations & Thesis Datasets Research Publications 74 3 14 63 66 11 17 60 No Yes 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Patents Projects Data Datasets Dissertations & Thesis Scientific publication’s full text Scientific publication’s metadata Research Publications 18% 51% 76% 58% 0% 0% 0% 0%0%0% 86% 49% 81% 0% 96% 51% IR CRIS 17 FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY An ERAI Report. March 2016 ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative IR INTEROPERABILITY Institutional repositories also hold links to other institutional services for sharing of information. However, from the responses to this survey their implementation does not reach %50 for any of these interoperability features, which are listed in Figure 16. The most frequent link is to library management systems (%47), followed by integrated search systems (%38) and researchers’ webpages (%36). The connection with financial systems is incipient (%4). Of course there are also links between IRs and CRISs as mentioned previously and shown in Figure 17. Several respondents mentioned the intention to link their CRIS and IR in the short to medium term. A link to a student administration system was also pointed out. Figure 17 provides an insight on how interoperability works within institutions. There are several interesting aspects in these results: (i) almost %65 of the institutions have linked their CRIS and their IR, so both platforms are perceived to be closely related; (ii) when it comes to interoperability FIGURE 16 IR LINKS TO OTHER INSTITUTIONAL SERVICES FIGURE 17 CRIS/IR LINKS TO INTERNAL SYSTEMS with legacy systems such as Finance and HR, CRISs are the preferred system to link because of the data and information contained in them; (iii) there is still very little integration between Learning Management Systems and either CRISs or IRs. This could subsequently be an interesting workline to devote some effort to. HR Management System Learning Management System Financial System Library Management System Institutional Repository 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 70% 80% 63% 8% 47% 36% 4% 2% 6% 68% 22% IR CRIS 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% R & D Units Instutional or author validation Curricula systems Researchers webpages Financial systems HR management systems Project management systems Learning management systems Integrated search systems Library management system No Yes 18 FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative An ERAI Report. March 2016 OPENAIRE AND ORCID COMPLIANCE Compliance with OpenAIRE is met by %69 of the IRs from which survey responses have been collected. As opposite to this, the use of ORCID persistent identifiers is still not very common (%23). The ORCID implementation rates across CRISs and IRs is rather similar, as shown in Figure 19. FIGURE 18 OPENAIRE AND ORCID COMPLIANCE FOR IRS FIGURE 19 CRIS/IR ORCID ADOPTION 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 ORCID OpenAIRE compliant 36 36 36 363636 No Yes No answer ORCID IR ORCID CRIS 23% 32% 19 FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY An ERAI Report. March 2016 ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative IR INSTITUTIONAL OR AUTHOR EVALUATION Institutions are being increasingly compelled to internally implement assessment exercises both for overall institutional performance (including research) and for author evaluation. Furthermore, national and international bodies are asking for an increasing number of performance indicators in relation to research and innovation. CRISs and IRs are excellent candidates to support these exercises because through those systems, Institutions can collect the data needed for the evaluation exercises, analyse those data, compare and benchmark them against historical data. As the Figures below show, those services haven’t reached a high level of maturity and there is place for further implementations and enhancements, but the path seems to be clear now. While Figure 20 shows that IRs are not yet fully exploited to provide this kind of support, neither are CRISs as shown on Figure 21. This is certainly a feature to explore so that both systems may eventually provide a useful support to these needs. FIGURE 20 IR INSTITUTIONAL OR AUTHOR EVALUATION FIGURE 21 CRIS/IR USAGE FOR INSTITUTIONAL OR AUTHOR EVALUATION 23% 77% No Yes CRIS Researches’ assesment IR Institutional or author evaluation 23% 31% 20 FINAL REPORT CRIS SURVEY ERAI EUNIS Research and Analysis initiative An ERAI Report. March 2016 ANNEX A: CORE SURVEY STRUCTURE INSTITUTION IDENTIFICATION PART I – CRIS SURVEY CRIS identification CRIS main functionalities CRIS Interoperability Protocols, Standards and Vocabularies Contact person for the CRIS Links to internal systems Links to internal systems Name of the institution URL of the institution Is your institution using a Current Research (Information System (CRIS Institution/company providing the CRIS Name of the CRIS Acronym of the CRIS URL for the CRIS Name Email R&D units Scientific publication’s metadata Scientific publication’s full text (APC management (Article Processing Charges Research data Projects Patents Bibliometrics Dissertations and Thesis Reporting Researchers’ webpages Researchers’ activity reports Researchers’ Curricula Vitae Researchers’ assessment Research analytics Other Institutional repository Library management system Financial management system Student management system Learning management system Human Resources management system Other Research grant system Award management system Project management system Accreditation management system OAI-PMH Shibboleth CERIF CORDIS FOS CASRAI ORCID If the CRIS is compliant with CERIF, please indicate the version of CERIF PART II – IR SURVEY DRIS Institutional Repository Identification Institutional Repository Content Protocols, Standards and Vocabularies Does your institution have an open access policy/mandate Contact details of the repository manager What type of content does your Institutional Repository store Which other institutional services does your repository shares information with Name of the repository URL of the repository Date of operation Repository Software Do you store institutional research outputs such as publications, patents or products in other systems other that the IRIf yes, which ?(one(s (Policy (Yes/No (Mandate (Yes/No URL of the open access policy/mandate Name Email Research Publications Datasets Dissertations and Thesis Learning Objects Other Library Management System Integrated Search Systems Learning Management System Projects Management System Human Resources Management System Financial System Researchers Webpages Curricula Systems Institutional or Author Evaluation Research & Development Units Other Is your Institutional Repository OpenAIRE-compliant Does your Institutional Repository register re- (searchers’ persistent digital identifiers ORCID If any, please describe steps taken (or planned to take) in order to integrate IR with CRIS Please indicate whether you consent that the data of this survey is used for the DRIS ANNEX B: LIST OF ACRONYMS AMUE APC BoD CERIF CMS CORDIS CRIS CRISTIN DRIS EPOS EUNIS FCCN FCT FOS HR ICT IM IR OAI-PMH OER R&I R&D URL Agence de Mutualisation des Universités et Établissements Article Processing Charges Board of Directors Common European Research Information Format Content Management System Community Research and Development Information Service Current Research Information System Current Research Information System in Norway Directory of Research Information Systems European Plate Observing System European University Information System Organization Foundation for National [Portuguese] Scientific Computation National [Portuguese] Foundation for Science and Technology Field of Science and Technology Classification Human Resources Information and Communication Technologies Information Management Institutional Repository Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Open Educational Resources Research and Innovation Research & Development Uniform Resource Locator