CERIF Task Group Meetings, 2012

During 2011, the CERIF TG has had an intensive work schedule and has met several times. In the UK there are a lot of CERIF-CRIS implementations and a plethora of JISC-funded projects (such as IRIOS, IRIOS-2, C4D, RMAS, CIA) in which CERIF plays a central part.

The stakeholders wish to unite the UK community and the need is felt for more information and in-depth discussion on CERIF-CRIS, a tutorial and a ‘surgery’ session. Moreover, CERIF has intersections with other TGs, particularly CRIS-IR, CRIS Architecture & Development and the new Linked Open Data TG, but never had joint meetings. Therefore it has been decided to match both needs and take this opportunity to bring the UK community and euroCRIS expert members together.

The meetings will be held on the 9th and 10th of February 2012. UKOLN is willing to host the event and will work jointly with the euroCRIS Secretariat, in consultation with the TG leaders, to make arrangements. Details have still to be elaborated, but the ideas are:

- Thursday 9th of February: Introduction to CRIS, CERIF tutorial, surgery section (UK community + CERIF experts)

- Friday 10th of February: 3 parallel sessions (6 TGs), half a day each

The bulk of this message is reproduced from an e-notification from EuroCRIS.

International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (CRIS 2012)

euroCRIS have released details of their 2012 Conference to be held 6-9 June, Prague, Czech Republic. The call for papers has been launched and IRIOS-2 will submit an abstract for the deadline of 10th December 2011.

The conference of next year is the eleventh event in the euroCRIS series of biennial conferences dedicated to improve the availability of research information across Europe. The target audience includes managers of research performing or funding institutions, evaluators,librarians, ICT experts, as well as policy makers. CRIS 2012 is organized by euroCRIS and InfoScience Praha, under the patronage of the Research and Development and Innovation Council of the Czech Republic, headed by the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic.

The theme of the Conference is: “e-Infrastructures for Research and Innovation – LinkingInformation Systems to Improve Scientific Knowledge Production”. The Conference willdiscuss recent trends in the development of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) in the context of virtual research environments and the construction of powerful infrastructures for e-Science. Three programme tracks have been defined, viz. Research Information Management, Advances in Technology, and Future Trends in Research Information Management. Tracks consist of keynotes by prominent stakeholders and contributed talks selected by the Programme Committee from submitted papers. Connected to the Conference will be an Exhibition and Business session as well as Workshops and Tutorials.

  For more information on CRIS 2012, important dates, Programme and Organizing Committee and contacts, see www.cris2012.org (from the euroCRIS homepage there is a link to the CRIS 2012 webpage)

JISC ResearcherID meeting

I was at the latest in the series of JISC researcherID task and finish group meetings in London yesterday. As always it was very informative including presentations from ORCID and the Australian approach to unique identifiers for research data. The JISC group (including representatives from RCs, HESA, HEFCE, Wellcome Trust, UCISA and ARMA are now close to agreeing a proposed way forward for the UK, we hope to undertake a formal consultation with the various stakeholders early in the new year.
For IRIOS-2 an (inter)national id for researchers would of course make the process of matching research outputs with projects much easier if both source systems used the same Id for the same person.

RIC – Research Information Centre

I recently had a teleconference with they guys from the British Library (in Boston Spa rather than St Panc) and Stephen Andrews reminded me about their Research Information Centre that they have developed in conjunction with Microsoft… Based on Sharepoint. It is open source and you can download it from their website… And version 2 is out soon. It provides an integrated research environment which does much of what RMAS plans to do… But it focusses on the researcher viewpoint rather than that of the research manager / administrator.

RCUK Research Outcomes System Launched

RCUK has just announced the launch of their new Research Outcomes System (ROS). IRIOS-2 is working closely with the ROS team and in particular Dale Heenan.  ROS is a web-based system that allows users to provide research outcomes information to four of the Research Councils – AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC and EPSRC.

Readers may be interested in attending the forthcoming ARMA workshop `CERIF in Practice`, which will take place on 7th December in Newcastle. This one day seminar is a unique opportunity to understand CERIF: the standard for Research Information exchange that has recently been adopted by the UK. For further details and to book please visist the following page; ARMA CERIF Event.

Research outcomes information can be submitted to ROS under the following categories:

• Publications
• Other Research Outputs
• Collaboration/Partnership
• Further Funding
• Staff Development
• Dissemination/Communication
• IP and Exploitation
• Award/Recognition
• Impact

Some key benefits and features of ROS are:

• Outcomes can be added at any time during the lifetime of a grant and beyond, not just at the end as with a final report.
• Existing data can be uploaded from HEIs own research information systems, helping to minimize duplication of effort in providing information to the Research Councils.
• A bulk upload option allows multiple publications and conference related outputs to be submitted at the same time, saving time and effort.
• HEIs have the ability to submit information to ROS on your behalf.
• Access to ROS can be delegated to any other Je-S registered users, including joint investigators or co-investigators, and research managers.
•  ROS takes account of and, where possible, accommodates the reporting requirements of other bodies, for example the UK Funding Councils’ Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data returns.
• It will help the Research Councils to streamline final reports.

Further information about ROS is available here .

The bulk of this message is reproduced from an e-letter from Dr Sue Smart, Project Chair (RCUK)

JISC and UK Research Councils to build a robust repository infrastructure for the future

News release 22.11.2011

Tracking the UK’s research outputs will become easier in the future thanks to JISC and Research Councils UK (RCUK) working together to utilise their expertise.

Over the coming months a piece of work called the RIO Extension project will take place to scope the issues and requirements from universities, funders and researchers in managing the information about research outputs. The aim of the work is to provide the UK education and research sector with clear, practical guidance on recording and sharing information about its research outputs, so that it can be reused for a variety of purposes, including by the systems used by the Research Councils.  

Neil Jacobs, JISC’s digital infrastructure programme director, says, “The UK research community punches well above its weight in terms of the quality and quantity of research outputs.  However, these are not systematically recorded, so it can be hard to demonstrate that impact.  Researchers, universities and funders have a common interest in ensuring that the outputs from UK research are visible, and that this is achieved without putting undue burden on the sector. 

 “This can be done using both institutional repositories and more sophisticated research information systems but, in either case, it is important that these interoperate effectively with the systems operated by research funders and others.  The RIO Extension project will describe a roadmap for the sector to achieve that.”

 Four of the Research Councils are shortly to launch the Research Outcomes System, which will be the primary means by which these Research Councils will collect this kind of information. JISC is supporting the creation of this service by ensuring that it works effectively and efficiently with institutional systems, including the UK repository infrastructure.  This flexible and community-owned infrastructure is well suited to meet the demands of the 21st century research community.

 Dr Sue Smart, Chair of the RCUK Research Outcomes Project, comments, “With this clear and practical guidance agreed for the research community and Research Councils to use, we can work together to significantly lessen the burden on institutions and organisations wanting to collect this data.”

 The RIO Extension project is also part of a larger programme of work scoping and delivering shared repository and curation infrastructure services at a national and international level.  This work supports the strategic requirements of universities, colleges, JISC and the Research Councils to build a robust repository infrastructure for the future.  It also contributes to the aspirations of the UK Open Access Implementation Group’s 2012 strategy.

 Find out more about the wider programme at <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/repositories.aspx>

 Find out more about the project at <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/repositories/rioextension.aspx>

 Explore JISC’s repository infokit and how it could help your organisation at <http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/repositories>

Research Output Discussion Group

A few of us from Scottish Universities got together informally yesterday to discuss research output management and I thought others might be interested in sharing what was discussed.

Anna Clements from St. Andrews gave an update and demo of their research information system.

Matt Barr, Andrew McHugh, and myself gave an update on the Engage project http://researchclusters.wordpress.com/   James Toon mentioned some useful topic work at Edinburgh that we can link in with.

Anna and myself gave overviews of the following projects:

IRIOS2 http://irios2.wordpress.com/ 

CERIF in Action http://cerifinaction.wordpress.com/

CERIF For Data http://cerif4datasets.wordpress.com/

Discussion points included:

• Unfunded projects – some HEI’s add these to their systems, other don’t.   How to encourage submission of these activities if there is not a funding incentive.
• Monitoring application success rates done to varying degrees with various approaches.
• Anna used Community of Science activities as basis  for categorising activities and will be doing further work on defining activities in future.  
• The Engage project has been using the RCUK classifications as a basis for mapping research activity.
• Keywords on outputs are not generally regarded as successful with greater confidence in data mining from project and output titles and content.
• Levels of data verification vary and most felt that although this can be resource intensive more should be done to improve the quality of data whether through further automation, staff training, or other means.  One method that has been in use at the University of Glasgow for many years is automatic emails.  http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/researchandenterprise/forstaff/researchsystemandprocesses/researchsystem/automaticemails/
• Some core systems record research activity from students and some do not.  
• We spoke about the potential for confidential information such as HR information or IP to be exposed via narrative fields in the RCUK Outcomes System.  We are confident that our colleagues at RCUK will ensure that data is secure and nothing inappropriate is made public but nevertheless felt we needed to manage this locally through training, communication and data checking to minimise the possibility of inappropriate comments being transferred to third parties.  We discussed how the University of Glasgow defaults publicity to ‘Yes’ for certain award types.   More details are available at: http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/researchandenterprise/forstaff/researchsystemandprocesses/postawardadvice/publicityflagonpaf/#d.en.105179 
• Definitions and terminology vary widely across the stakeholders and we look forward to the outcome of various projects that are working on proposals for standardisation.  There is a useful presentation on the benchmarking project ‘Snowball’ at: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/en/groups/cisg/Events/2011/cisg2011/~/media/groups/cisg/events/2011/CISG/CISG2011_06_Lisa_Colledge.ashx
• We discussed the different definitions and requirements of recording events and agreed this area needed further clarification. 
• The Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information  http://casrai.org/http://casrai.org/ may be of interest.  Some people have already had a demo and we plan to organise a discussion and demo for others.

We thought it was very useful and we may meet up again in the Spring.  Any comments welcome.

Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association

UCISA CISG Conference November 2011. 

A number of points of interest in relation to Research Outputs:

1) Customer Relationship Management Systems.

There seemed to be limited success in using CRM for research and knowledge exchange requirements and limited work done on integrating business contact information within formal ‘CRM’s’  with grant, contract, and agreement details in other core systems.

I am still pondering the question of how the information that is recorded on CRM systems fits with RCUK outcomes and how best to re-use the information e.g. should we use it direct from the CRM and combine with other sources such as repositories and research systems, or perhaps export relevant data to repositories.

2) Research Information Management

We had a lively discussion about how systems and analysis of the data within them might drive research excellence.  The concensus seemed to be that if done well they can help free up academic time to focus on research and help identify potential collaboration opportunies for further funding.

This is where IRIOS 2 might come in – assisting with cross Research Organisation collaboration.

3) David Sweeney gave an interesting talk on Current Issues in Research, Management and Support.  He noted the importance of over reliance on league tables and metrics and advocated focussing on what the data really illustrates.

4) Rachel Curwen from the University of York gave a clear and honest overview of their journey to implementing a system for capturing and managing research outputs.

Previously York had used an Access database for the 2008 RAE.  They found having the data assembled in one collection useful and wanted to do this more formally than specifically for the purpose of RAE/REF.

Rachel showed some nice diagrams of thier vision, and mainifestations of data in thier new research information system.

Lots of the information about thier system and processes is available publicly at http://www.york.ac.uk/staff/research/pure/

They are still working on some reporting but are confident they will be able to re-use the research outputs to satisfy a range of requirements.

Event page from where I assume presentations will be available soon:

http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/cisg/Events/2011/cisg2011.aspx

Joint IRIOS-2 and CIA workshop

On December 5th Sunderland will be hosting a CERIF technical workshop with the other RIM3 project, CERIF in Action (CIA). As well as bringing the two projects together to share experience, two CERIF experts from euroCRIS will also be joining us. Brigitte Jörg from the DFKI in Berlin who is a euroCRIS CERIF Task Group, and Prof Keith Jeffery the president of euroCRIS.
Brigitte and Keith will be in Sunderland for most of the week and will also be inputting to a workshops for other JISC projects: C4D and RMAS as well as looking at CERIF data requirements for REF2014 and an ARMA workshop on Wed 7th (in Newcastle). The ARMA workshop is open to all and there are still a few places left.

Related Projects

There are a number of projects related to IRIOS-2.

Further information about these projects can be found by clicking the links below-

• Brunel Research Under a CERIF Environment (BRUCE)
• CERIF for Datasets (C4D)
• CERIF in Action
• CERIFy
• CRISPool
• Enrich and Enquire as part of Enlighten at the University of Glasgow
• Integrated Research Input and Output System (IRIOS)
• Measuring Impact Under CERIF (MICE)
• Readiness for Research (R4R)
• Research Management and Administration System (RMAS)
• Trialling Collaborative Online Tools for BCE

Key Stakeholders for the project include-

• EuroCRIS
• JISC
• Research Councils UK (RCUK)
• EPSRC
• ESRC
• NERC