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)

• 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.

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.

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.

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.