euroCRIS membership meeting in Madrid

Just returned from the euroCRIS membership meeting in Madrid, the largest to date, with around 80 participants. euroCRIS  is showing a steady growth in membership, at around 15% per year. It was particularly interesting that the takeup of CERIF in the UK in the last few years was acknowledged as an important strategic breakthrough for the standard. In addition, the JISC Research Information Management Programme was cited as an example to follow! JISC funding of a number of small UK-based projects has been seen to have had a big impact.

An Ariadne article on the meeting is in the pipeline, so some selective points of interest follow here in the meantime:

• A new euroCRIS board has just been elected (now with 50% women members)
• CRIS 2012  in Prague this year was also the largest euroCRIS conference to date – interest in CERIF CRIS is growing at many levels
• euroCRIS is continuing to grow its strategic partnerships – an agreement with COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) was signed during the meeting
• CERIF 1.5 has been released – a major upgrade this time
• The Linked Open Data Task Group has carried out a mapping of VIVO and CERIF  (a potential use case is performing analytics on VIVO and CERIF data)
• A new Task Group on impact indicators was introduced at the meeting
• The Snowball Metrics ‘Recipe Book’ was distributed – designed to facilitate cross-institutional benchmarking (and will be CERIF compliant)
• Despite a lot of interesting CRIS activity in Spain, no Spanish CRIS are currently CERIF compliant – although there may be scope for alignment of CVN (a national system for exchanging standardised CV information) and CERIF; however this is not straightforward, since CVN is researcher-based. There is a wide range of CRIS in use, unlike in the Netherlands (where METIS is used by everyone) and the UK (three systems) which makes coordination more complicated. Spain has the same issues as other countries with person IDs.
• Three Italian research organisations have recently merged into CINECA. Planning to implement CERIF using open source software is already underway, which will bring 100 Italian research institutions into euroCRIS
• A session on identifiers covered current work by the CERIF Task Group to incorporate federated identifiers into the CERIF model, effectively opening up closed internal systems to the outside world; ORCID could be one of the person IDs assigned
• A Directory of Research Information systems (DRIS) is being developed; the system is currently being populated by euroCRIS members in a trial phase, before being opened to the wider public to input their CRIS details.  The DRIS could in future act as the basis for a portal to access heterogeneous CRIS

With the new euroCRIS board in place from January 2013, there are likely to be some changes afoot next year. Presentations from Madrid should be available shortly on the euroCRIS website.