DSpace-CRIS: How to Bring Repositories and CRIS/RIMS Together

CRIS/RIMS (Current Research Information Systems / Research Information Management Systems) are becoming more and more relevant to monitor research activities and outputs, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of institutional performance and providing insight for budget allocation, collaboration and funding opportunities, etc.

Proprietary CRIS are expensive and often compete with Institutional Repositories, draining resources and closing information behind barriers, contrary to the OAI principles.

DSpace-CRIS is a free open-source extension of DSpace, a solution to oppose this trend and reassign the prominent role that Institutional Repositories need to play in the scholarly ecosystem. It extends the scope of the repository supporting a broader range of information typically managed in CRIS/RIMS. Originated in 2009 from a collaboration with the University of Hong Kong, the main characteristic of DSpace-CRIS is a flexible and extensible data model, which allows the creation and management of any kind of entities (such as researchers, organizations, projects, etc.) and the relations among those entities, besides bibliometric, collaboration networks, statistics.