Abstract
The present contribution is divided into two parts. The first part, written by Susanna Mornati, describes the impressive progress of the CRIS adoption in Italy, brought forward as a personal experience leading the CRIS team. In less than one year, starting from September 2014 to July 2015, sixty-six Italian institutions (mostly universities and some research centres) adopted the same platform, a version of DSpace-CRIS called IRIS, customized for the Italian research environment. DSpace-CRIS provides an institutional Open-Access repository built in the solution: this was a unique opportunity to make publication data available on the Internet at a national level and gain insight on the Italian scientific production across several years. Moreover, the rapid adoption of ORCID at a national level gave the opportunity to enhance the quality of metadata.The second part, written by Paola Galimberti, presents the results of her research on data extracted at a national level from the areas of Biology, Humanities and Social Sciences. For the first time in Italy these data were available in a standard then comparable format. The research hypothesis was to verify if and how the research assessment exercises of organizational structures (institutions and their departments) and of individuals had any influence on the publishing choices of Italian researchers. As a conclusion, the results are not univocal, and additional investigations are necessary for a deeper understanding of the phenomena taking place.
Highlights
The present contribution is divided into two parts
DSpace-CRIS provides an institutional OpenAccess repository built in the solution: this was an unique opportunity to make publication data availbale on the Internet at a national level and gain insight on the Italian scientific production across several years
Still in 2014 the situation related to the management of data on research in Italy presented a number of critical issues: the most diffused system was closed and data were not publicly available, the Ministerial system was closed, its data only available to individual/institutional owners, duplicate records proliferated, metadata were poor and limited, no validation processes were in place to check accuracy and consistency of the information entered
Summary
In 2004 in Italy a national assessment exercise (called VTR, more recently VQR) was introduced to evaluate the quality of research in universities and the main research centres. Still in 2014 the situation related to the management of data on research in Italy presented a number of critical issues: the most diffused system was closed and data were not publicly available, the Ministerial system was closed, its data only available to individual/institutional owners, duplicate records proliferated, metadata were poor and limited, no validation processes were in place to check accuracy and consistency of the information entered. This mass of unverified data was still used to analyze and evaluate the quality of scientific production and the performance of institutions. The success of the huge operation was guaranteed by the strong competence and experience of the project team, the technical excellence of the solution, the high-level change management strategies that were adopted
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