OpenAIRE compatibility for CRIS systems: recent progress

Abstract

This paper reports on the progress that the OpenAIRE-funded, euroCRIS-led METIS2OpenAIRE project means for the implementation of the OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers. An update of these guidelines has taken place in the past two years to enable a smoother and more effective information exchange process between CRIS systems and the OpenAIRE aggregation. METIS2OpenAIRE aimed to ensure OpenAIRE compatibility based on these version 1.1 guidelines for a first institutional research information management system, namely METIS at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. This three-and-a-half-month project also set out to support a number of parallel implementations by external, budget-neutral stakeholders that would ensure a widespread adoption of the newly released CRIS interoperability standard. These were PURE, the single most widely adopted CRIS platform worldwide, and OMEGA-PSIR, a widespread CRIS solution in Poland.The work carried out under the METIS2OpenAIRE initiative and its results as of mid-2018 are described in this piece. These results include the development of a minimally sufficient OpenAIRE validator for CRIS systems. This software, specifically designed to support the interoperability requirements for the METIS institutional CRIS at Radboud, should gradually evolve into the default mechanism for other CRIS systems to use in order to test their own level of compliance with the OpenAIRE Guidelines. As for the external stakeholders, by mid-2018 there is already significant progress in the route towards OpenAIRE compatibility for both PURE and OMEGA-PSIR.