On July 10th 4Science delivered a COAR Member-Only webinar titled “DSpace-CRIS: How to Bring Repositories and CRIS/RIMS Together”.
We introduced the concept of CRIS/RIMS (Current Research Information Systems / Research Information Management Systems), systems that 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.
There are several proprietary CRIS systems available in the market, but they are usually 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. The DSpace-CRIS’ main characteristic is the flexibility and extensibility of its 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.
In case you were not able to attend the webinar, slides and recording are now available online:
If you have additional information you’d like to have, do not hesitate to contact us, we’ll be able to organise a demo presentation for you.