An ORCID based synchronization framework for a national CRIS ecosystem.

João Mendes Moreira,Nuno Macedo,Alcino Cunha

doi:10.12688/f1000research.6499.1

Abstract

PTCRIS (Portuguese Current Research Information System) is a program aiming at the creation and sustained development of a national integrated information ecosystem, to support research management according to the best international standards and practices. This paper reports on the experience of designing and prototyping a synchronization framework for PTCRIS based on ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). This framework embraces the "input once, re-use often" principle, and will enable a substantial reduction of the research output management burden by allowing automatic information exchange between the various national systems. The design of the framework followed best practices in rigorous software engineering, namely well-established principles in the research field of consistency management, and relied on formal analysis techniques and tools for its validation and verification. The notion of consistency between the services was formally specified and discussed with the stakeholders before the technical aspects on how to preserve said consistency were explored. Formal specification languages and automated verification tools were used to analyze the specifications and generate usage scenarios, useful for validation with the stakeholder and essential to certificate compliant services.

Highlights

PTCRIS (Portuguese Current Research Information System) is a program, officially initiated in May 2014 by FCCN (Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional), the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia – the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) unit responsible for planning, management and operation of the national research and education network, a high performance platform for developing and testing advanced communication applications and services
In order to achieve this goal, a synchronization framework is being developed that relies on ORCID – a community-based service that aims to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a method of linking research outputs to these identifiers, based on data collected from external sources – as a central hub for information exchange between the various national systems and international systems (WoK, Scopus, Datacite, etc.)
Outputs without unique identifiers (UIDs) are duplicated in the ORCID profile when exported; our framework forbids the exportation of productions without UIDs to avoid this issue

Summary

Introduction

PTCRIS (Portuguese Current Research Information System) is a program, officially initiated in May 2014 by FCCN (Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional), the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia – the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) unit responsible for planning, management and operation of the national research and education network, a high performance platform for developing and testing advanced communication applications and services. CV management systems and open-access repositories typically connect with ORCID only in the IMPORT context and only support creation notifications, not allowing the user to EXPORT research outputs back to ORCID Such is the case of services like Impactstory (http://impactstory.org), ScienceOpen (http://www.scienceopen.com) and Symplectic’s Elements (http://symplectic.co.uk/ products/elements). The exception is Thomson Reuters’ ResearcherID (http://www.researcherid.com), which aims to provide a unique researcher identifier, and that allows the user to export research outputs back to the ORCID profile Some of these services, like Impactstory and Elements, resort to ORCID only to harvest UIDs and retrieve meta-data from other trusted services, ignoring the actual ORCID works. Outputs without UIDs are duplicated in the ORCID profile when exported; our framework forbids the exportation of productions without UIDs to avoid this issue

Conclusion

Findings

Stevens P