University of Sussex connects Figshare to Symplectic Elements to create a joined-up research data management solution – Symplectic

“Digital Science, a technology company serving stakeholders across the research ecosystem, is pleased to announce that the University of Sussex has successfully integrated Figshare and Symplectic Elements from Digital Science’s flagship products to create a seamless, interoperable research information and data management solution….

Sussex has been using Symplectic Elements as its Current Research Information System (CRIS) since 2020, initially integrated with EPrints as its institutional repository (called Sussex Research Online, or SRO). In 2022, Sussex took the decision to migrate SRO from EPrints to Figshare in order to create a more joined-up solution to support its Open Access needs. Moving to a full Figshare institutional repository supports the streamlining of IT Services and also enables repository staff teams to be more flexible as they work with Figshare alone, as opposed to two varying systems for papers and data….”

Acceso abierto: aprender de casos de éxito en universidades | blok de bid

From Google’s English:  “The document is organized in three sections. In the first part, the Working Group makes a comparison of the evolution of the positions reached by its institutions (members of the 2019-2020 Open Access Working Group) in the 2019-21 editions of the CWTS Leiden Open Access ranking . The classification is based on the percentage of open access publications available, which makes it possible to evaluate the progress of the institutions in the implementation of open access. 

In the second part, four key factors of Group institutions that have helped to achieve outstanding open access results and thus to achieve a good position in the CWTS Leiden ranking in that category are identified and described :

Open access policies. Institutions with strong policies perform better than those without specific policies, beyond those required by funders. These policies should place deposit work flows at the center of academic activity and promote the consolidation of an institutional team to support the implementation of open access.
 
Availability and configuration of the institutional system (repositories/CRIS). The presence of an interconnected institutional repository and research information management system (CRIS) is crucial. The importance of capturing bibliographic metadata in CRIS and the transfer flow of metadata and files with the appropriate version of the text to the repository, where it is offered in open access or with an embargo period, is highlighted. 
 
Institutional research support staff. It is critical to have a dedicated Open Access/Open Science training and support team within the institution, usually within the library. This team should offer guidance and assistance to researchers in preparing their publications for open access, validation of publications in CRIS, as well as in meeting the requirements of funding policies. Open access training may include topics such as copyright, user licences, and research data management.
 
Collaboration and institutional commitment. Collaboration and commitment between different actors are essential to successfully introduce open access in institutions. This implies the active participation of researchers, libraries, IT services and other relevant departments. The institution should foster an environment in which open access is valued and supported, and where its importance to research and institutional reputation is recognized….”

ORCID coverage in research institutions—Readiness for partially automated research reporting

Reporting and presentation of research activities and outcome for research institutions in official, normative standards are more and more important and are the basis to comply with reporting duties. Institutional Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) serve as important databases or data sources for external and internal reporting, which should ideally be connected with interfaces to the operational systems for automated loading routines to extract relevant research information. This investigation evaluates whether (semi-) automated reporting using open, public research information collected via persistent identifiers (PIDs) for organizations (ROR), persons (ORCID), and research outputs (DOI) can reduce effort of reporting. For this purpose, internally maintained lists of persons to whom an ORCID record could be assigned (internal ORCID person lists) of two different German research institutions—Osnabrück University (UOS) and the non-university research institution TIB—Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology Hannover—are used to investigate ORCID coverage in external open data sources like FREYA PID Graph (developed by DataCite), OpenAlex and ORCID itself. Additionally, for UOS a detailed analysis of discipline specific ORCID coverage is conducted. Substantial differences can be found for ORCID coverage between both institutions and for each institution regarding the various external data sources. A more detailed analysis of ORCID distribution by discipline for UOS reveals disparities by research area—internally and in external data sources. Recommendations for future actions can be derived from our results: Although the current level of coverage of researcher IDs which could automatically be mapped is still not sufficient to use persistent identifier-based extraction for standard (automated) reporting, it can already be a valuable input for institutional CRIS.

Publications router – populating repositories automatically – Jisc

“Find out how you can capture your researchers’ articles automatically onto your institution’s repository or CRIS, including the correct version of the full-text article and its licence, without having to find and upload them manually.”

Research performance and scholarly communication profile of competitive research funding: the case of Academy of Finland | SpringerLink

Abstract:  The Academy of Finland (AKA), Finland’s major public research funding agency, uses a Web of Science (WoS) based bibliometric indicator to assess the performance of research it has funded. We use an alternative methodology to compare (1) the research performance and (2) the scholarly communication profile of AKA-funded research to the Finnish universities’ entire output across the major fields of arts and sciences. Our data consists of 142,742 publications (years 2015–2018) registered in the national information service, which integrates Current Research Information System (CRIS) data of 13 Finnish universities. Research performance is analyzed using the Finnish community-curated expert-based rating of publication channels (so-called JUFO). Our results show that compared to the Finnish universities’ entire output a larger share of AKA-funded research is published in leading JUFO rated journals and book publishers. JUFO and WoS-based indicators produced consonant results regarding the performance of AKA-funded research. Analysis of publication profiles shows that AKA-funded research is more focused than the universities’ output on using peer-reviewed publications, articles published in journals, English language, foreign publishers and open access publishing. We conclude that the CRIS-based publication data can support multidimensional assessments of research performance and scholarly communication profiles, potentially also in other countries and institutions. CRIS development and maintenance require multi-stakeholder commitment, resources and incentives to ensure data quality and coverage. To fully recognize diverse open science practices and to enable international comparisons, CRISs need further development and integration as data sources.

 

Using current research information systems to investigate data acquisition and data sharing practices of computer scientists – Antti Mikael Rousi, 2022

Abstract:  Without sufficient information about research data practices occurring in a particular research organisation, there is a risk of mismatching research data service efforts with the needs of its researchers. This study describes how data acquiring and data sharing occurring within a particular research organisation can be investigated by using current research information system publication data. The case study organisation’s current research information system was used to identify the sample of investigated articles. A sample of 193 journal articles published by researchers in the computer science department of the case study’s university during 2019 were extracted for scrutiny from the current research information system. For these 193 articles, a classification of the main study types was developed to accommodate the multidisciplinary nature of the case department’s research agenda. Furthermore, a coding framework was developed to capture the key elements of data acquiring and data sharing. The articles representing life sciences and computational research relatively frequently reused open data, whereas data acquisition of experimental research, human interaction studies and human intervention studies often relied on collecting original data. Data sharing also differed between the computationally intensive study types of life sciences and computational research and the study types relying on collection of original data. Research data were not available for reuse in only a minority of life science (n?=?2; 7%) and computational research (n?=?15; 14%) studies. The study types of experimental research, human interaction studies and human intervention studies less frequently made their data available for reuse. The findings suggest that research organisations representing computer sciences may include different subfields that have their own cultures of data sharing. This study demonstrates that analyses of publications listed in current research information systems provide detailed descriptions how the affiliated researchers acquire and share research data.

Successful implementation of Open Access strategies at Universities of Science & Technology

“While the CWTS Leiden ranking has been available since 2011/2012, it is only in 2019 that a first attempt was made at ranking institutions by Open Access-related indicators. This was due to the arrival of Unpaywall as a tool to measure openly available institutional research outputs – either via the Green or the Gold OA routes – for a specific institution.

The CWTS Leiden ranking by percentage of the institutional research output published Open Access effectively meant the first opportunity for institutions worldwide to be ranked by the depth of their Open Access implementation strategies brushing aside aspects like their size. This provided an interesting way to map the progress of CESAER Member institutions that were part of the Task Force Open Science 2020-2021 Open Access Working Group (OAWG) towards the objective stated by Plan S of achieving 100% Open Access of research outputs.

The OAWG then set out to map the situation of the Member institutions represented in it on this Open Access ranking and to track their evolution on subsequent editions of this ranking. The idea behind this analysis was not so much to introduce an element of competition across institutions but to explore whether progress was taking place in the percentage of openly available institutional research outputs year on year.

The results of this analysis – shown in figures within this paper for the 2019, 2020 and 2021 editions – show strong differences across Member institutions that are part of the OAWG. From internal discussions within the group, it became evident that these differences could be explained through a number of factors that contributed to a successful Open Access implementation at an institutional level. This provided the basis for this work.

The document identifies four key factors that contribute to a successful OA implementation at institutions, and hence to achieving a good position on the CWTS Leiden ranking for Open Access. These factors are:

• Open Access policies. This aspect is highlighted as the key driver for a successful OA implementation: high-ranked institutions typically implement strong OA policies, whereas low-ranked ones often lack a specific policy beyond the (common) one issued by the European Commission for its framework programmes.

• Institutional system configuration (repositories and/or current research information system (CRIS) systems). The way institutional systems support OA implementation are configured is also a critical element for a high ranking. High-ranked institutions within the OAWG often have an interconnected institutional repository and a CRIS. Other institutions only operate a repository and some have neither.

• Institutional research support staff. A strong OA policy and an adequately configured set of institutional systems may not be enough to guarantee a successful OA implementation if the research support staff behind such work is not numerous or well-trained enough.

• Open Access advocacy strategies. One of the key areas of activity for such staff is the communication with researchers to highlight the relevance of Open Access implementation at a given institution and to provide the required support workflows….”

CRIS2022 Conference: Call for Proposals | Linking research information across data spaces | euroCRIS

“CRIS2022 Conference: Call for Proposals

The 15th CRIS Conference on Current Research Information Systems will be held next Spring (May 12-14, 2022) as an on-site event in Dubrovnik, Croatia. In order to collect proposals for presentations, papers and other contributions to this conference, euroCRIS is putting out the following call for proposals….

The CRIS 2022 conference will address recent trends in the significance, position and use of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and more specifically the opportunities they offer for research information exchange and aggregation across institutions, regions, countries and/or stakeholders (eg between institutions and research funders). For this purpose, the conference will gather researchers, managers of research-performing or funding organisations, evaluators, librarians, research administrators, ICT experts and policy makers.

The general theme of the conference is “Linking research information across data spaces”, emphasising the need for using the ever more widespread CRIS implementation to ensure smooth and effective mechanisms for research information exchange and aggregation. From Open Science implementation to business intelligence through research assessment, such interoperability mechanisms offer opportunities to improve the research information management processes in many different domains…”

 

Latin America could become a world leader in non-commercial open science

“In the 1990s, new repositories and databases were born that would become pillars of a solid infrastructure for open-access scientific communication. With the launch of the open access journals databases Latindex, SciELO and Redalyc, the digitisation of scientific journals was given a boost and a quality seal was granted to published research. With a strong public imprint, these repositories acted as a springboard for the development of non-commercial open access environment that is today the hallmark of the region.

Latin America now has the optimal conditions to create open science infrastructure that capitalises on these previous efforts. And two examples stand out.

Brazil’s BrCris was developed by the Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia alongside major national public agencies. Brazil is an immense country, with a professionalised scientific and technological system that has produced many databases on a national scale, making integration a huge challenge. Examples include the Open Data Portal, the CV system Plataforma Lattes and the directory of research groups known as CNPQ….

The second case is that of the PerúCRIS platform. It was first devised when Peru approved its Open Access Law in 2013. The need then arose to integrate three scientific information platforms: the directory of researchers, the national directory of institutions and the national network of repositories. The new platform also includes all undergraduate and graduate theses….”

Research systems connect | Jisc

“Research systems connect is a fully managed, cloud-based service that joins up your existing institutional research systems (including your CRIS, repository and preservation systems) so you can save time on transferring data and metadata between your systems and free up staff time for other tasks. It also connects to external scholarly communications services, maximising impact with minimal effort….”

 

University of Hull Open Access Policy – revised May 2021 – Digital Repository

“The University of Hull recognises open access publication as a valuable component of dissemination for research outputs. Open access publication channels for journal articles in particular now sit alongside more traditional publication channels as options: equivalent options are rapidly developing for monographs and research data. Open access dissemination of research outputs broadens the audience that can be reached and enables wider awareness of the research. This can generate more and quicker impact, with concomitant reputational benefits for future research.

Research funders are increasingly advocating and requiring consideration of open access as a means of publication to realise these advantages. Similarly, openness of research generally is now at the forefront of public research funding policy, and open access is a key component of this. This policy describes an approach to open access for the University of Hull that blends the advantages of open access with the requirements laid out by funders in following this path.

This revised and updated policy was agreed in May 2021….”

Research repository | Jisc

“The research repository is a fully-managed software as a service (SaaS) solution. It provides a multi-content repository to manage all your institution’s research outputs (research articles, datasets and theses) including metadata-only records and those outputs that don’t have access to subject or funder data repositories.

It is the most connected repository on the market with an open interoperability framework using message APIs that permit integration with a wide range of institutional systems including current research information systems (CRIS), digital preservation systems and external scholarly communications services….”

RDM-Services – Events – GÉANT federated confluence

“This collaborative workshop will explore different service delivery models that research institutions can adopt when supporting data management. These could apply to research information management systems (CRIS), data repositories, e-Lab notebooks and many other platforms.

Delivery models typically include open source software that is supported in-house, outsourced hosting of OSS, vendor-supported commercial services, and bespoke institutional services. Various partnership models supported by institutional groups, national consortia and NRENs will also be explored.

The workshop will run adjacent to the 16th Research Data Alliance plenary in Costa Rica. In order to support international participation, all sessions will take place daily at 20:00-22:00 UTC – Check your timezone here.  Attendees can sign up for individual sessions.

Monday 2nd November: Opening panel and workshop introduction
Tuesday 3rd November: Procurement pain points
Wednesday 4th November: Open Source business models
Thursday 5th November: Partnerships
Friday 6th November: Closing discussion …”

DRIS+: Enhancing the euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS)

“The DRIS+ proposal aims to enhance the euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS) and to make it automatically searchable via a dedicated API.

This improvement is a follow-up action to the euroCRIS-led 3-month METIS2OpenAIRE project that was awarded funding by OpenAIRE in early 2018. This project allowed the first institutional CRIS (METIS at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands) to expose and test its metadata feed against the CERIF-XML Guidelines and to undergo the first test validation against a minimally sufficient validator developed by euroCRIS.

As the number of test-harvested CRIS system increases and the opportunities grow for expanding this OpenAIRE data provider role across vendors and solutions, the enhanced DRIS is seen as a key element to streamline the process for metadata harvesting from the OpenAIRE portal….”