I made an enquiry to the UKCoRR mailing list asking whether anyway was using a CRIS in the UK. The replies were interesting, with a lot of interest in Symplectic. Only one reply from the list used InfoEd. The other options I asked about included PURE from Denmark, and the ProQuest Research Support Suite, which is a bit of a red herring, I don’t think it really performs entirely the work of a CRIS, especially when looking internally at an institution.
It’s quite obvious that in the lead up to the REF there’s a lot of naval gazing going on in terms of how universities are managing their research information. There are discussions over buildiing in-house systems, versus buying in a solution. I do think it’s a niche market here in the UK that Symplectic have jumped into. We’re in the process of considering how to go about this – a few things spring to mind for anything that eventually fills the gap:
Must be able to import our existing information from a legacy system
Should be able to integrate with various university systems (not the least being the repository)
Must be based on CERIF standards (I need to read up more on this).
Any comments on experiences with using a CRIS most useful. I wonder how they do this in Australia and elsewhere abroad..
Current Research Information Systems
January 21, 2009 by Kara
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Interesting article. The interest in CRIS systems is obviously gaining priority among many UK HEIs. During the latest months we have been contacted by a hand full of UK universities looking for suitable systems to support them primarily for the REF. However, we have obviously not made enough marketing in the UK as our system, CONVERIS, is not mentioned in the article.
CONVERIS is a standard and CERIF compliant end-to-end Research Information System. It is primarily used for publication management & bibliometrics, contract administration & grant reporting, and as a complete CRIS for the management also of many other types of research information. As the REF obviously is an important driver for many UK universities, we are also closely following what HEFCE is doing and offer a guarantee that CONVERIS will comply with the (still partly unknown) requirements for the REF.
As a direct comment to how “this is done abroad”, it could be of interest to have a look at Sweden, where we currently implement a national Research Information System. This is a step beyond the institutional level with the purpose to make the collection and data quality assurance more efficient through collaborative means. If it would be of interest to find out more, just post a comment and I can add some further details (if Kara permits).
Thanks Martin- now that you’ve mentioned CONVERIS, I’ve noticed it mentioned in some of the CRIS literature! Will look into it! Feel free to send a link.