OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers in DSpace-CRIS

For developers of CRIS platforms, the OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers provide guidance to add supportive functionalities for CRIS administrators and users. Exchange of information between individual CRIS systems and the OpenAIRE infrastructure is an example of point-to-point data exchange between CRIS systems, since the OpenAIRE infrastructure itself is a CRIS system.

On December 20th, 2018, an updated version was released for the OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers. In May 2019, 4Science was awarded the implementation of the Guidelines in the open-source software platform DSpace-CRIS, which extends the DSpace repository platform by research data and information management.

Today we can already count more than 100 installations of DSpace-CRIS running in research institutions throughout Europe and other continents, which emphasizes the potential when making their rich research information interlinked and findable in OpenAIRE.

The main objectives of this project were to realize the implementation of the latest OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers in DSpace-CRIS and to enable DSpace-CRIS platforms to expose research information to OpenAIRE. The implementation targeted DSpace-CRIS releases version 5.10 and version 6.3 and was released as open source in the first phase of the project.

The implementation allows every single institution to crosswalk the local DSpace-CRIS configuration, entities and attributes, toward the OpenAIRE CRIS specification in a 1:1, n:1 or 1:n mapping at the instance level. This means that a DSpace item entity, which in DSpace-CRIS is used to represent different sorts of research output, can also be mapped in a different OpenAIRE CRIS Entity (Publication, Patent, Product), depending on a specific metadata of the item or different entities in DSpace-CRIS; for instance the Journal and the Publication can be mapped to the same CERIF Publication Entity.

The presentation will deal with the challenges and the results of the project, the lessons learnt by its participants and the expected outcomes and impact on the OpenAIRE and CRIS communities.