CERIF Best Practice

CRISs (Current Research Information Systems) are becoming increasingly important for organizations that are related to research, such as funding organisations, universities, and ministries. A CRIS holds information on research activities, results of research, and competence. A CRIS is useful for assessing a person or department, to show the institution's activity, to monitor scholarly activities, and as a base for the development of research strategy. This could be from a local CRIS, national CRIS, or from interoperable CRISs. A CRIS will be really useful if it is structured and can interoperate with other CRISs. The CERIF model (Current European Research Information Model) is a structured model and is able to give statistics for planning, evaluation, and assessment within an institution or benchmarking among institutions. The CERIF CRISs are able to give multiple views, such as a researcher's CV and an overview of an institution's projects (ongoing or ended) with project partners on an organizational or personal level. The output publications of a project are given for an individual researcher or institution, with linkage to the full text (in the local repository) and a list of journals where researchers or organizations are publishing, events, and an annual report on an individual researcher. A CERIF CRIS is recommended by the EU for interoperability among CRISs. A CERIF provides a one stop shop for users and gives uniform access to full text publications and scientific data. A partial model for people, organisation, and results, not projects, can be used. It is recommended, however, to implement the full model. To secure consistent information, it is also recommended to establish authority lists for people (unique ID, name, organization, position, age, sex, etc.) organsations (name, acronym, address, etc.), journals (title, acronym, publisher, URL, etc), and books (publisher, acronym, address, county, etc.) in the CERIF CRIS