euroCRIS Members Meeting

University of St. Andrews- November 11-13

Earlier in the month I attended the euroCRIS Members Meeting hosted at the University of St. Andrews. euroCRIS is a not-for-profit association and aims to be the internationally recognized point of reference for all matters relating to Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). The organisation are also charged by the EC as the custodians of CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) an international standard for interoperation of CRIS, and an EU recommendation to the member states.

The first day of the meeting provided an introduction to the group for new members like me, through short presentations on the group’s current activities. There was also a tutorial on CERIF, describing the conceptual model of how the ideal CRIS would be structured and what information should be held to describe every research activity and the relationships between the key entities. The CERIF model is standardized but it is up to the institution applying the model within their system as to which semantics are used to describe each element. This is recognized as a barrier to CRIS interoperability and the euroCRIS Board have begun to look at a Publication Type standardization list. CERIF is a standard and there are a handful of CRIS that are CERIF compliant. CERIF has also been prepared in XML format so it can be applied to a system being designed in- house.

The second day of the meeting began with presentations from a number of specially invited speakers from Scottish HEIs. Valerie McCutcheon gave an interesting presentation on the University of Glasgow’s in- house CRIS. The CRIS is fed by the University’s HR, finance and student records systems as well as their institutional repository Enlighten. The system then in turn feeds the finance and student records systems, the institutional repository and University department’s research mapping databases and academic’s webpages. The system can keep tabs on everyone involved in University research regardless of whether they are internal or external to the University, or whether they are a member of staff or a student. The system is also set up to e-mail the lead researcher of a project to remind them of forthcoming project milestones such as reporting deadlines. Glasgow are currently funded by JISC for their Enrich project, looking to improve the integration of Enlighten with the CRIS.

The second presentation came from Lisa Rogers, Heriot Watt University who is working on the journalTOCs project. The project has aggregated the table of contents’ RSS feeds of over 12,000 journal titles to provide a search and current awareness service for journal publications. The project has also created a number of APIs which can be embedded within a website. One API can offer a search on journal titles, another on article metadata. A third API can limit a search down to those journals subscribed to by an institution. It’s also possible to create a MyTOCs list of selected journal titles. Lisa discussed two possible use cases for the application of a journalTOC API for a repository manager: the first, to help identify new content for a repository; the second, to enhance the metadata of existing recently added items in the repository. It is also possible to set up an alert when a pre-print within a repository is finally published in a journal. I asked Lisa afterwards about the possibility of applying the API in a repository as a way of auto-completing metadata when making a submission to a repository. It was thought that with some developer’s magic this could be possible. The use of the API in this method with some of the commercial CRIS was also discussed as highlighted by the journlTOCs team in their blog post about their attendance at the meeting: Presentation at EUROCRIS.

In the afternoon a presentation was given by Marjan Vernooy, SURFfoundation in which she outlined the results of an investigation comparing three CRIS- PURE (Atira), CONVERIS (Avedas) and Metis. The study compared the three systems on a number of points such as: input and registration; output and reporting; adaptability; and pricing. Although all three systems scored similarly, PURE was the system that scored the highest on most points.

Another presentation of note was given by Mark Cox, Kings College London about their R4R (Readiness4REF) JISC project. The presentation focused specifically on the project objectives directly related to CERIF which are based on the development of a CERIF4REF profile. This profile would act as a wrapper around current CRIS data to make it compatible for REF reporting. The project is also looking to work with both publishers and RCUK to explore the use of CERIF4REF in importing/ exporting data. The application of CERIF4REF with ePrints, Dspace and Fedora repository systems is also being considered.

With the forthcoming REF the implementation of CRIS within institutions has come to the fore. The euroCRIS group is a good point of reference for those interested in the benefits of a CRIS and their potential uses. euroCRIS can offer training in these areas and also hold biennial conferences on related topics. To take advantage of all of the group’s services it is necessary to take out an annual membership . Different membership types are available.

Citation Count APIs

A couple of weeks ago Stuart Lewis disseminated to the repository community some work he had been doing on a citation count API for use in repositories. The API created by Stuart creates a plug-in to a repository item record showing the citation count for that item in the SCOPUS bibliographic index. The API works by matching the DOI included in the repository item record with the DOI in the SCOPUS record for the same item. Discussion within the mailing lists however, highlighted that it would be fairly easy to extend the API to match with an item’s title/ author/ year etc. if DOIs are not consistently present within repository item records. A blog post about the API and how to implement it within a repository can be found within Stuart’s blog. Further examples of how the citation count API can be used are available from the SCOPUS website.

An example of the SCOPUS citation count API in action within a repository record can be seen from The HKU (University of Hong Kong) Scholars Hub . This item record example also has citation counts for the item within Web of Science. Through some Google searching I hunted down the following blog post by Jonathan Rochkind at John Hopkins University highlighting the application of the “Link Article Match Retrieval Service” (described at the bottom of the webpage). If your institution has a subscription to WoS, this API will provide you with the citation counts for an item matched by DOI/ author/ title for use within a repository record.

The use of citation counts within repository item records can be extremely useful within the forthcoming REF as a way of demonstrating the level of ‘Impact’ an item has had. It can also be a way of enabling institutions to select the publications they wish to put forward for the REF, highlighting a well received piece of research.

The APIs described above will give you the total citation counts for the item within those specific bibliographic databases. For some institutional reporting the citation counts per year are necessary but specific subscriptions to WoS and SCOPUS services are necessary to access these.


If you would like more information about the use and implementation of citation count APIs within your repository please contact the WRN Team at wrnstaff@aber.ac.uk.

More on impact and value

This is just a quick update to pass on a useful article about repositories and impact. Colin Smith of Open Research Online has recently posted an article on his blog outlining the benefits of an IR when it comes to impact and demonstrating value for the REF. Definately well worth a quick read!

Research Management News

The second consultation document for the Research Excellence Framework has now been published. This document sets out the new arrangements for the assessment and funding of research in UK higher education institutions that will replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), including information about the proposals to assess the impact of research. Responses to the consultation should be made by midday on 16th December 2009.



Secondly, a euroCRIS membership meeting will take place in St. Andrews on the 11-13 November 2009. euroCRIS is the professional association of CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) experts and custodian of the CERIF standard, and is dedicated to improvement of research information availability.

The membership meeting programme will comprise: a euroCRIS overview session, including business meeting; a CERIF tutorial; progress of the new website; Scottish session and Jostein Hauge session. A one-day workshop on the last day will deal with CERIF-CRIS implementations, their benefits and problems.

Are any partners already members of euroCRIS? Or is anyone interested in joining? The membership fees are reasonable and given that a few of our partners are considering implementing CRIS systems we feel this is an area worth finding out more about. Please contact us via wrnstaff@aber.ac.uk if you are interested in going to this meeting or already planning to attend.

The REF: Results of Pilots and Future Developments

I recently attended a one day programme organised by Kings College London on The REF: Results of Pilots and Future Developments. Supported by HEFCE, the day gave those involved, and not involved, with the pilot alike the opportunity to learn more about the planned direction of the REF. The day consisted of a number of presentations to all delegates in the morning including two speakers from HEFCE, with parallel sessions on various related topics running in the afternoon.

A large emphasis within the REF Pilot had been on citation analysis, with debate circulating as to the use of such analyses to replace the peer review process used previously within the RAE. What papers would be considered within the REF was also the subject of debate with the pilot considering three possible methods of identifying academic’s papers for citation analysis (as explained to the WRN at this month’s Gregynog Colloquium Repository Stream by Lyndsey Savage, Bangor University): all academic papers identified by author’s name; all academic papers by author’s institutions; selection of academic papers for authors.

From attending the London event, it seems that the REF will bear a resemblance to the previous RAE, with a selection of an author’s best papers being put forward for peer- review assessment, and the citation analysis for each paper being provided to inform the panel. What still remains unclear is which sources will be used to inform the citation analysis. Web of Science and SCOPUS were both used within the pilot but concern was expressed by a number of delegates within one of the parallel sessions I attended that their institution either subscribed to one service or the other, and not both. The use of Open Access sources such as repositories was not going to be used to gather citation analyses as far as I could tell from discussions.

The assessment of ‘impact’ of research will also form part of the REF, a factor that none of the discussions I'd heard previously had even considered. How institutions will construct, record and store such information along with the author data, the research ouput data and the citation data is a new challenge to be met.

The use of repositories for the management of such information to construct an REF return was touched upon. Two JISC projects presented in one of the afternoon sessions were R4R (Readiness for REF) and a project at the University of Reading, with both looking specifically at how a repository can be developed for this purpose.

The second afternoon session I attended ‘ICT implications for the REF,’ discussed research conducted on behalf of JISC that surveyed REF pilot institutions as to their use of ICT in preparing information for the pilot. The study found that the use of ICT was varied between each institution, and that institutions would have to develop much better processes for capturing research outputs, the crux point for all being trying to successfully link research output data to staff data.

A number of systems were being used within the institutions of the attendant delegates, with both research management systems and repositories in place. A second JISC study, ‘Repositories and Research Management Systems,’ found minimal integration between the two systems or their processes when in place within an institution. Some of the newly funded JISC projects, including Cardiff University’s I-WIRE project, which are looking as to how such systems can be integrated were presented on the day.

There were around 300 delegates in attendance on the day and it was interesting to see the variety of job titles; with a large majority either affiliated with the research office, the library or the repository. This highlighted to me the number of stakeholders involved in an institution with an RAE/ REF return and brought home further the need for not only integration between disparate systems but collaboration between disparate departments.