Just back from the euroCRIS Spring 2013 membership meeting which was held in Bonn this week, 13-14 May at the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). As well as being one of the main research funders in Germany, DFG is also one of the main providers of research information at a national level. There has been a recent upsurge in CERIF-related activity in Germany, as related in the many interesting national presentations. These included a significant initiative to develop a ‘Core Data Set’ for research activities in Germany. Leuphana University reported on use cases to reduce workload but also increase the quality of research reporting (since quality is valued most). Developments in Italy include a CERIF compliant open source CRIS in DSpace (as part of SURplus) at CINECA (with Hong Kong University as a partner). I presented a work in progress report on my current study for JISC addressing the use of CERIF CRIS in the UK.

The draft OpenAIRE guidelines for CRIS interoperation based on CERIF XML were announced. euroCRIS is a partner in several EU projects including OpenAIRE and the new PASTEUR40A project on OA and open data. Other euroCRIS news included the development of a CRIS ‘Reference system’ with data export in CERIF XML plus compliance testing. euroCRIS is also working on mapping CASRAI data profiles to CERIF; the CASRAI approach is bottom up and CASRAI top down, so the two complement each other. In closing the meeting, Ed Simons, the new euroCRIS president suggested that euroCRIS work has previously focused more on technical development of the CERIF model and implementation, whereas it’s now relevant to spend more time addressing business needs.

euroCRIS participants congregate for the official group photo at DFG
(photos by Pablo de Castro and Barbara Ebert)

There is an ongoing need for alignment: given the requirements of different projects, and that CERIF can be interpreted in different ways, there are inevitable slight variations in mappings eg between CERIF in Action (CIA) and Gateway to Research. The need for collaborative working arose several times – the CIA project has experienced the advantages of institutions, funders and vendors working closely together. Stability is also a key requirement for successful software development (REF was cited as an excellent example of stability, with very few revisions); however research information management has been changing very rapidly recently, with many additional system requirements coming at one time. As ever, the issue of data quality came up, this time in discussion of GtR handling of many layers of data.

There are key UK sustainability issues to address, in the context of Jisc funding for RIM and CERIF coordination and support at UKOLN ending in June/July 2013. euroCRIS and CASRAI are potential homes for outputs, but investment is needed to support ongoing coordination effort.

Given the number of Pure users in the UK (21), it’s now a large group, with several working groups taking forward key issues outside meetings. Two members of staff from Atira participated – there was an good working atmosphere reflecting the positive relationships with Atira which institutions had previously reported.

Working groups reported on:

• OA and repositories – including connectors for Scopus/WoS, APCs, work on OA metadata in CERIF (and with CASRAI)
• data sets – minimal metadata as short term goal, with broader aims in long term; data sets are next big thing after REF!
• student data – most institutions don’t allow students to update their own profile in the CRIS (because of the resource requirement)
• activity data – work on UI, parallel CASRAI work
• web services – as another interface to institutional data

• The CONVERIS CRIS does already support ethics review and is being used for this purpose by UK user institutions. However functionality is currently limited compared to what is being developed – Avedas are working with CASRAI (as described below) at the same time as reviewing institutional requirements in order to develop configurable forms, workflows and user rights for CONVERIS (systems programming changes are not anticipated). The CONVERIS specification will be aligned with CASRAI work.
• Although Symplectic Elements could currently support the capture of ethics review information such as an ethics status flag, institutional users have not yet expressed this requirement; it is thought that most Symplectic users currently capture ethics information either offline or in pre-award/clinical trial systems.
• Likewise Atira report that Pure users have not requested support for ethics review, so it is not currently provided within Pure (apart from a flag to remind staff to initiate ethics review) and there are no plans to change this for the moment.

Therefore while one of the drivers for the Research Management and Administration System – Ethics Extension (RMAS-EE) work was the need to raise awareness of the role that ethical review plays in research projects, another was to reduce administrative overheads. It was funded by the Jisc research information management (RIM) programme as a rapid innovation project, starting in July 2012 and finishing in December 2012.

As its name indicates, the project extends the work of the earlier RMAS project which developed a Procurement Framework to enable universities to purchase individual research management system modules using a simplified and much-shortened procurement process. It also developed tools and guidelines to help institutions integrate new modules with existing research systems and corporate systems. RMAS uses CERIF for the representation of data and worked with euroCRIS to extend the CERIF vocabulary to meet UK requirements. An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) facilitates the exchange of messages (encapsulated in CERIF) between different research management applications.

The RMAS-EE project was based at the University of Kent, one of the three RMAS ‘pathfinder’ institutions. However the blog points out that the project team at Kent was not involved in the original RMAS project and was therefore dependent on RMAS documentation to understand the applications. The project consequently provided a useful case study for RMAS as a side product.

Prototyping the integration of the ethical review of research proposals into the RMAS framework was the central aim of RMAS-EE. Additional aims as indicated included informing the CERIF data standard so that it is better able to describe ethical review information.

The existing OpenEthics software was adopted to manage the ethics review process. The project planned to use the RMAS Supplier Agnostic Connector (which is based on a commercial product) between OpenEthics and RMAS to translate to and from CERIF. However investigation revealed that expected specifications were missing (for the proposal-created message in particular) so it was decided to use the project team’s expertise in Python to write the required software instead. Another issue encountered was synchronising users across RMAS and the OpenEthics system. A mapping solution was developed for the project, but this will be a problem that any other integration work will also need to address.

The original plan was to contribute to the CASRAI data dictionary as well as the CERIF standard; while this proved to be unnecessary to meet immediate project needs, the University of Kent is continuing to work with CASRAI on the structure of an ethical review application, which would allow interoperability of different systems for managing ethical review. Agreeing the status definitions (whether a project has been approved or not) will be the first step. The project participated in the inaugural CASRAI UK chapter meeting in December 2012. Avedas (developers of CONVERIS) are also part of the CASRAI UK Ethics Review working group.

One of the project’s conclusions was that ‘ RMAS as a concept works brilliantly’. However the team has expressed several concerns about the broader RMAS environment. Firstly the lack of RMAS event specification and a production ready ESB means that integrating with RMAS is very difficult (it was acknowledged that only the team’s strong technical capabilities made this possible). Secondly, there is no evidence of an RMAS user community – when the project proposed a specification for discussion, there was no response. As a result it was not possible for the project to test the claim that integrating research ethics into RMAS allows enhanced reporting of ethical review data in the broader research information context, because there were no other systems to integrate with via RMAS.

The project has been useful in initiating further activity relating to ethics review in the international standards communities, specifically euroCRIS and CASRAI. It is less clear if awareness has been raised in the wider UK research information management communities (a diverse group). A key output of the project is the proposal to euroCRIS for including ethical review Status in the CERIF vocabulary. The terms are currently under consideration by the CERIF Task Group. As well as software outputs, the project has also made a lot of technical documentation available via the blog which could be useful for future RMAS integration work.

• Interoperable data rather than integrated systems
• Agreed business processes are needed as well as the data
• Understanding the business need for collecting research information (institutions often collect more information than required)
• Data quality versus quantity
• Tensions surrounding research data use in allocating funding
• Trust in how data may be used by other organisations
• Identifying benefits of standardised research information/ metrics for researchers (eg discovering opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration in a large institution)
• Persistent identifiers – eg person IDs (ORCID etc)
• Managing definitions and vocabularies (eg agreeing definitions was the biggest challenge for the Gateway to Research)
• CASRAI data dictionary (UK edition planned)
• Strategic leadership in UK – BIS? (need to ensure realisation of efficiency benefits across the communities)
• More coherence across RIM initiatives needed?
• International perspective – eg Snowball global aims, CASRAI

A report based on input and workshop discussions is planned, to be shared with the wider community.

• The JISC-funded Kit Catalogue Project carried out during 2011 at Loughborough University delivered an open-source system available for any HEI to catalogue and share information about their research equipment. The catalogue implemented at Loughborough is publicly available
• The University of Leeds together with its partners within the N8 consortium has developed and implemented a common taxonomy to categorise medium and large-scale research equipment
• Funded by EPSRC, the Uniquip project aims to deliver a set of standards for cataloguing and publishing information about research facilities and equipment; partners are the Universities of Southampton, Leeds, Loughborough and Bath
• The University of Bath has also integrated its existing >£10k asset register into Pure (allowing linking of equipment to other information such as outputs)
• CASRAI UK is likely to take forward work on an authoritative list for equipment/facility.

REDIC is a JISC-funded rapid innovation project which ran from June to November 2012. Managed by the University of Edinburgh Digital Library, development was carried out by EDINA. The project has built a CERIF-compliant prototype system and infrastructure to support an authoritative registry of information about research equipment and facilities, intended for use by researchers. Making the prototype available in the CERIF format enables incorporation or referencing in local Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) or institutional repositories.

The prototype model is shown below.  SWORD is used as the deposit mechanism and DSpace as the record store. The use of Sword was a challenge initially because SwordV2 did not interface with DSpace in the way the project required. However this was fed back into the DSpace/Sword communities for discussion and resolution.

The core dataset used was recommended by the Uniquip project and acquired from Southampton via the data.ac.uk site. Other datasets (such as the N8 taxonomy) can be added as required by adjusting the ingester. DSpace provides a facility to convert data to CERIF-XML. However some required data elements could not be mapped to CERIF – REDIC has therefore worked with Brigitte Jörg from the CERIF Support Project at UKOLN and initiatives at other UK institutions to suggest additional CERIF entities to be considered by the CERIF Task Group. CERIF 1.3 (in February 2012) previously included improvements to the equipment and facility entities.

The equipment and facilities contained within the register are each assigned a persistent identifier  (via the Handle System, as used by DSpace). The CERIF data model allows the linking of equipment to other information, such as people, projects and outputs (including research data) produced as a result of using the equipment; impact of use (and sharing) can therefore be captured.

REDIC has succeeded in bringing the concept of equipment/facility into the ‘information mix’ as an instrument of research. Together with the other equipment initiatives, REDIC is supporting steps towards the cultural change needed to achieve wider implementation and realise the benefits.

So the idea is to develop a UK edition of the CASRAI dictionary, which will build on the existing dictionary to include additional lists required by UK research organisations. Some of these may be unique to UK needs but others could be adopted more widely in time. There will therefore be a common core dictionary, with extra layers to meet national needs. Some requirements will also be discipline-specific. The main aim of the meeting was to decide priority areas for the UK, working towards a first release of a UK edition in June 2013. This is an ambitious timescale but work is not starting from scratch – the aim is always to reuse existing terminology work where possible. CASRAI standards are all about harmonisation rather than uniformity or a lowest common denominator approach, which often has limited success.

The CASRAI dictionary is also a very good fit with the CERIF data model, since it provides the missing business agreements which are not covered by CERIF. Some initial work on ‘CERIFying’ the dictionary has already been carried out. However a variety of storage models are possible (eg CERIF, VIVO, LATTES, proprietary) and likewise exchange models (eg CERIF-XML, VIVO-RDF).

A number of priority areas for the UK were identified and scoped during the meeting with the managers of current UK initiatives addressing those areas. The key topics discussed were:

• Research ethics review: definitions for content of messages indicating ethics application status (the Research Management and Administration System Ethics Extension (RMAS-EE) project funded by JISC will provide key input) – a full ethics review profile would require a lot more effort
• Data management plans: the DMP Online tool developed by DCC will be a key content resource (work carried out by the CERIF for Datasets project is also relevant; the Research Councils are key stakeholders here)
• ‘Authoritative lists’
  • Facilities and equipment – the taxonomy developed by the N8 Consortium is being used by others included the Uniquip project
  • Institutions – HESA is the authoritative source for UK institutions but is there a requirement for a consolidated international list?
  • Person names

Profiles for research outcomes and impact were raised as potential UK requirements although this needs further scoping because of time constraints. Open access issues were also highlighted. Some further prioritisation will be needed to ensure an achievable workplan.

The UK CASRAI initiative working alongside the common global harmonisation effort and using the CERIF data model, offers an exciting opportunity to improve the interoperability of research information management systems internationally.

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.

The CERIF in Action project forms part of the JISC Research Information Management programme third phase (RIM3). This phase has focused on business to business information exchanges between live systems. CIA has therefore developed a standard CERIF-XML schema and built plug-ins to import and export data in this format for CRIS, repository and Research Council software. Two business processes were chosen: exchanging data between partner institutions (eg when an researcher moves to a new institution) and uploading grant-level information to the RCUK Research Outputs System (ROS).

At the workshop institutional project partners successfully demonstrated the use of these plug-ins with their live systems: the University of Cambridge demonstrated the uploading of publications data to ROS via their Symplectic plug-in and the EPrints plug-in was shown in action by the University of Glasgow.

Dale Heenan revealed huge predicted savings in reporting cost per RC grant per year from using CERIF eg from the highest cost of £15.40 for manual single reporting to £0.50 using CERIF bulk reporting. Further detail on these figures would be useful.

It was interesting that the content of the workshop amply illustrated that leadership in implementing and embedding CERIF in UK research information infrastructures is now coming from RCUK and HEFCE – this was identified as critical in Stuart Bolton’s business case report back in 2010. RCUK indicated that they are using the valuable work produced by JISC programmes and putting it into production systems. Testing of the Gateway to Research within the Research Councils also starts this week.

A user profile has been set up for all academic and research staff, so on logging into the system for the first time, existing data can be accessed on research grants and contracts, publications and postgraduate research students. Information in the profile has been taken from several University systems including human resources, the EPrints instutional repository, finance and the student system. I can report that the interface is very user friendly, having just added a new publication (including full text) to my profile. For now, staff can only access their own research information; at a later date tailored views will be possible, so that eg Heads of Department will be able to view departmental data. There is a facility to create CVs and bibliographies and later this year automatic population of personal web pages will be available. The Research Development and Support Office provides a Pure User Guide and a series of training workshops is being held from July until end September.

The REF module will go live at the end of September, with a ‘dress rehearsal’ exercise planned to start in October. The Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN will also be working with University of Bath colleagues to test REF submission from Pure using CERIF; a CERIF XML template is currently being developed with HEFCE.

The institutional repository will be populated via Pure from now on – adding a full-text document to a publication’s record automatically adds the full-text document to the corresponding record in the IR. However, like many other UK universities, Bath will assess the requirement for a separate repository in the medium term, if it can be demonstrated that Pure is capable of replicating EPrints functionality.

The reporting module is due to be launched in November, following further development work by Atira to cater for specific UK reporting requirements.

Jane Millar, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, and Pure Project Sponsor, has said that the implementation of Pure is a major step forward in how  information about research is handled at the University. It’s certainly looking good from a researcher point of view.

Another signficant step forward announced was a test verion of a ‘CERIFy’d’ Research Outputs System (ROS) which had just been made available on the first morning of the workshop. A demo can be viewed showing CERIF import. Live use is planned within several weeks. With NERC taking the decision to move to ROS, there will shortly be five Research Councils using the system. Interestingly, ROS plans to harvest from institutional repositories, which will avoid PIs having to submit individual outputs. ROS  staff are working closely with the JISC CERIF in Action project and there are also close parallels with the IRIOS2 project.

The CERIF-based Gateway to Research (GtR) was another focus of discussion. Whereas ROS will be used for institutional input, GtR will be for access. Since data will be sourced from six different Research Council systems with no common ontology, a data dictionary will need to be developed. The project has been advised (by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia) to concentrate on making the data available in a standard format (CERIF) and not to worry about the interface – instead prize challenges will be offered to communities for developing applications.

As might be expected the issue of identifiers arose a number times, researcher identifiers in particular, with ORCID being recommended by the JISC Task and Finish Group. HESA also highlighted the ‘big opportunities’ for person identifiers.  The prospect of a ‘UK ORCID’ was discussed, alongside the business case and data security issues. JISC will be looking at organisational identifiers next, agreed as a much more difficult nut to crack.

Repository infrastructure development work was presented by the RepNet project at EDINA (aiming to increase the cost effectiveness of open access repositories) and RIOXX (metadata guidelines for repository managers specifically).

A range of breakout groups covered topics including impact, vocabularies/ontologies, institutional repository/CRIS challenges, research data, and options for maintaining CERIF outputs from JISC project (eg role of euroCRIS and CERIF task group). The REF breakout discussion resulted in agreement with HEFCE to develop a CERIF XML template for research groups, staff and outputs submission and to initiate a test pilot for submission (with KCL and the University of Bath – both to be approached). A test pilot will allow valuable learning within a proper framework – import/export of CERIF XML is planned to start in September 2012.

Presentations from the workshop and breakout outputs are available via the programme page. A fuller event report will be published in the next issue of Ariadne.

In order to address the need for more support for CERIF use in UK, the JISC RIM Programme and UKOLN ISC are coordinating a range of support initiatives. Among these is a new CERIF national coordinator post, based at UKOLN. A CERIF Tutorial and UK Data Surgery was organised in Bath in February 2012, together with euroCRIS task group meetings. A range of CERIF-related resources is provided, including the recent UK CERIF adoption study. UKOLN ISC is also working with the euroCRIS Best Practice Task Group to produce supporting materials on CERIF use. These are just some examples of activities. In parallel, the UK user groups for the individual CRIS platforms (Pure, CONVERIS and Symplectic Elements) have grown rapidly in the last 18 months (as a result of much procurement) and provide valuable CERIF support for institutional users.

However despite the widespread use of CERIF as an underlying standard, many institutions are not engaging with CERIF directly. Staff find CERIF complex and rely on external expertise from CRIS vendors and UK user groups; only institutions involved in JISC projects are properly engaging with CERIF. Many staff are keen to engage more – this is likely to happen as local CRIS implementations are completed and institutions are able to start exploiting the many efficiency benefits offered by CERIF.

JISC funded four projects in RIM2: BRUCE, CERIFy, IRIOS-1 and MICE, which ran from February to July 2011, with some extensions until the Autumn allowing for the short timescale. As a departure from RIM1 (which had a broader remit), all projects were based on CERIF at the core and aimed to:

All the projects have helped to move CERIF use forward at a technical level in various ways. The BRUCE project for example developed an open source CERIF-based reporting tool. While the reporting element may not be innovative in itself, mapping data to CERIF has allowed Brunel University to perform analysis on research information which was not previously possible. The open source tool could be used by other smaller HEIs without a ‘full’ CERIF CRIS.

The CERIFy project also worked with institutions which did not have a CERIF CRIS at the time. It carried out business process mapping for common RIM activities (which revealed many similarities across institutions). The project successfully tested the export and re-import of CERIF-compliant institutional data from the CERIFy CRIS to Thomson Reuters InCites.  This was innovative in that it demonstrated data exchange rather than one-way import/export, which is the most common process, given the lack of mature CERIF compliant systems which are capable of exchange and the absence of business demand to date.

However the IRIOS projects (1 and now 2) have been working with the Research Councils, and therefore helping to drive forward the CERIF agenda outside HEIs; the business need may grow in future. IRIOS developed a CERIF-based demonstrator ‘interrogation’ tool for Research Council-funded projects and outputs.

The MICE project was driven by the fact that CERIF did not fully address impact issues, thus limiting its applicability to the UK Research Excellence Framework. The project worked closely with euroCRIS and succeeded in extending CERIF to incorporate impact indicators and measures into the model’s architecture. However further work is needed to agree a taxonomy of indicators and measures within the community.

Brigitte Jörg’s in-depth tutorial covered the CERIF data model (eg there are lots of entities but all are described in exactly the same way) and how it is used, including new items in CERIF 1.3. CERIF also has a triple structure, so can link to the semantic web.

The data surgery in the afternoon focused firstly on a synthesis of UK CERIF mapping work, so involved a number of JISC projects, including CERIF in Action, IRIOS (1 and 2) and CERIFy. There was lively discussion on some of the issues to be resolved eg multiple identifiers, person names, titles, vocabularies. The CERIF in Action project is tasked with implementing the resulting model.

Other sessions covered CERIF use in the Research Management and Administration System (RMAS) – institutions will be able to start buying from framework at the end of February; CERIF and research datasets; linked open data; and a taxonomy of research equipment for inclusion in CERIF. A fuller write-up will follow.

Most of the presentations are already on the UKOLN web site. A number of participants used the #cerifbath Twitter hashtag at the event and a record of the tweets has been published on Storify. Twitter users (and, indeed, non Twitter users) at the event may also wish to add their details on the CERIF tutorial and UK data surgery Lanyrd page which will enable you to make links with others with an interest in this area.

Also watch this space for JISC RIM project synthesis posts, coming up soon…

The Group will be meeting in Bath (see details of agenda, papers, maps, etc.) on 10 February 2012, alongside the other euroCRIS Task Groups, and preceded by the CERIF Tutorial and UK Data Surgery on 9 February.

For the first time euroCRIS task group meetings will be co-located, and preceded by a CERIF tutorial and data surgery. UKOLN, euroCRIS and JISC are jointly organising these events on 9-10 February. CERIF, the Common European Research Information Format, is now being widely used in UK higher education institutions as a result of many recent procurements of CERIF-based CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) – particularly during 2010 and 2011. However staff in many institutions have expressed the desire to strengthen their understanding of CERIF in order to better exploit the opportunities offered by this powerful (and complex) standard. The meetings are being supported by the JISC Research Information Management (RIM) Programme which is working to increase engagement with CERIF and support the emerging community of practice in the UK.

An introductory CERIF tutorial will be held on the morning of 9 February. In the afternoon there will be a ‘data surgery’ session which will examine the use of CERIF in real life scenarios. The aim is both to support new adopters of CERIF and to consolidate existing expertise. The afternoon session will therefore be divided into two groups – one for those new or relatively new to CERIF, and another for more advanced users. Participants are being asked to bring CERIF queries and data modelling/mapping issues for discussion with CERIF experts.

On 10 February five euroCRIS task groups will meet in parallel sessions. See the agendas and note that CERIF expertise is not required to participate. Task group leaders are keen to gather UK RIM experience.

The meetings are open, and all those involved in research information management (eg CRIS managers and IT staff, metadata/repository managers, research office staff…) are strongly encouraged to participate.

Note that the closing date for registration is 3 February.