CERIF Best Practise
 

Anne Gams Steine Asserson¹

¹ Department of Research Managment, University of Bergen, Norway

e-mail: anne.asserson@fa.uib.no

CRISs (Current Research Information Systems) are becoming increasingly important for organizations that are related to research, like Funding organisations, Universities or Ministries. A CRIS holds information on research activities, results of research and competence. A CRIS is useful for assessing a person or department, to show the institutions activity, to monitor the scholarly activities, and a base for developing of research strategy. This could be from a local CRIS, national CRIS or from interoperable CRISs.

A CRIS will be really useful if it is structured and can interoperate with other CRISs. The CERIF model (Current European Research Information Model) is a structured model and are able to give statistics for planning, evaluation and assessment within an institution or benchmarking between institutions. The CERIF CRIS are able to give multiple views. From a researchers CV, overview of an institutions projects (ongoing or ended) with project partners on an organization or personal level. The output publications of a project are given for a individual researcher or institution, with linkage to the full text (in the local repository) and list of journals where researchers or organizations are publishing, events, annual report on an individual researcher.

A CERIF CRIS is recommended by EU for interoperability between CRISs. CERIF provide a one stop shop for users and gives a uniform access to full text publications and scientific data. The model can be used partly that is Persons, Organisation and Results and perhaps not Projects. One is however recommended to implement the full model. To secure consistent information it is recommended that there is established Authority lists for Persons (unique ID, name, organization, position, age, sex, etc.) Further lists like Organsations (name, acronym, address, etc.) and Journals (title, acronym, publisher, url, etc) and Books (publisher, acronym, address, county, etc.) are also recommended in a CERIF CRIS.