Research Portals (enhanced CRIS) as a source of Quality-controlled Metadata

We described a tool (research portal/CRIS) that, although designed for bureaucratic control, it is providing a valuable source of metadata information about the research activities and outputs of the institutions. The fact that is built and revised locally can be a guaranty of human quality curation that could be better than the one supplied by the commercial indexes. The results show that there is a lot of CRIS services that need to be polished, that most of the metrics still came from traditional external sources (duopoly WoS/Scopus) and that there is little standardization (in spite of CERIF) for exchanging data except if there are sharing the same CRIS software. However, the number of CRIS installed are growing fast, many became public and the new generations of software are providing richer and better interfaces. Moreover, the open APIs from the new bibliometric databases (Dimensions, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Lens) can add more quantitative information to outputs not indexed by WoS/Scopus. This includes new relative indicators that are far more useful for evaluation purposes. This contribution is a plea to both the metric community to pay more attention to CRIS as a source of valuable local curated information and to the CRIS developers and their customers in the academia for increasing the quantity and quality of the metadata incorporated in the new versions of their programs