Research management: useful resources
Below is a collection of useful reports, websites, blogposts etc. relevant to different aspects of research management systems.
Directory of Research Information Systems
euroCRIS is developing an international Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS)
Jisc UK directory of institutional repositories
Jisc Research Data Management Toolkit
This toolkit aims to support you through the entire lifecycle of research data management (RDM). It explains what you should consider and signposts resources from a wide range of websites and organisations.
Practices and Patterns in Research Information Management. Findings from a Global Survey.
Rebecca Bryant, Anna Clements, Pablo de Castro, Joanne Cantrell, Annette Dortmund, Jan Fransen, Peggy Gallagher, Michele Mennielli. OCLC and euroCRIS OCLC RESEARCH REPORT 2018
“This report contributes to a growing body of work from OCLC to better understand RIM practices, including their regional differences, as well as the growing interoperability imperative between siloed sources of data—both internal and external. Of particular interest to library readers of this report is the documentation of how university RIM workflows are increasingly intersecting with those in the library, particularly as it relates to the relationship with institutional and data repositories.”
Research information management systems – a new service category?
Most of the information below is taken from a 2014 blog post by Lorcan Dempsey. It serves as a good introduction to the topic of CRIS / RIMS.
What follows is an extract for Lorcan Dempsey’s blog. Click on the link above to read the complete blog post:
October 26, 2014 Lorcan Dempsey
It has been interesting watching Research Information Management or RIM emerge as a new service category in the last couple of years. RIM is supported by a particular system category, the Research Information Management System (RIMs), sometimes referred to by an earlier name, the CRIS (Current Research Information System).
For reasons discussed below, this area has been more prominent outside the US, but interest is also now growing in the US. See for example, the mention of RIMs in the Library FY15 Strategic Goals at Dartmouth College.
Research information management
The name is unfortunately confusing – a reserved sense living alongside more general senses. What is the reserved sense? Broadly, RIM is used to refer to the integrated management of information about the research life-cycle, and about the entities which are party to it (e.g. researchers, research outputs, organizations, grants, facilities, ..). The aim is to synchronize data across parts of the university, reducing the burden to all involved of collecting and managing data about the research process. An outcome is to provide greater visibility onto institutional research activity. Motivations include better internal reporting and analytics, support for compliance and assessment, and improved reputation management through more organized disclosure of research expertise and outputs.
A major driver has been the need to streamline the provision of data to various national university research assessment exercises (for example, in the UK, Denmark and Australia). Without integrated support, responding to these is costly, with activities fragmented across the Office of Research, individual schools or departments, and other support units, including, sometimes, the library. (See this report on national assessment regimes and the roles of libraries.)
Some of the functional areas covered by a RIM system may be:
- Award management and identification of award opportunities. Matching of interests to potential funding sources. Supporting management of and communication around grant and contracts activity.
- Publications management. Collecting data about researcher publications. Often this will be done by searching in external sources (Scopus and Web of Science, for example) to help populate profiles, and to provide alerts to keep them up to date.
- Coordination and publishing of expertise profiles. Centralized upkeep of expertise profiles. Pulling of data from various systems. This may be for internal reporting or assessment purposes, to support individual researchers in providing personal data in a variety of required forms (e.g. for different granting agencies), and for publishing to the web through an institutional research portal or other venue.
- Research analytics/reporting. Providing management information about research activity and interests, across departments, groups and individuals.
- Compliance with internal/external mandates.
- Support of open access. Synchronization with institutional repository. Managing deposit requirements. Integration with sources of information about Open Access policies.
To meet these goals, a RIM system will integrate data from a variety of internal and external systems.Typically, a university will currently manage information about these processes across a variety of administrative and academic departments. Required data also has to be pulled from external systems, notably data about funding opportunities and publications.
Products
Several products have emerged specifically to support RIM in recent years. This is an important reason for suggesting that it is emerging as a recognized service category.
- Pure (Elsevier). “Pure aggregates your organization’s research information from numerous internal and external sources, and ensures the data that drives your strategic decisions is trusted, comprehensive and accessible in real time. A highly versatile system, Pure enables your organization to build reports, carry out performance assessments, manage researcher profiles, enable expertise identification and more, all while reducing administrative burden for researchers, faculty and staff.”
- Converis (Thomson Reuters). “Converis is the only fully configurable research information management system that can manage the complete research lifecycle, from the earliest due diligence in the grant process through the final publication and application of research results. With Converis, understand the full scope of your organization’s contributions by building scholarly profiles based on our publishing and citations data–then layer in your institutional data to more specifically track success within your organization.”
- Symplectic Elements. “A driving force of our approach is to minimise the administrative burden placed on academic staff during their research. We work with our clients to provide industry leading software services and integrations that automate the capture, reduce the manual input, improve the quality and expedite the transfer of rich data at their institution.”