Integrating CRIS and repository – an overview of the situation in Finland and in three other Nordic countries

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track Papers and Panels

Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) are being implemented rapidly in many universities and other research organizations all around Europe. Although research information systems of some sort have been around for a long time, an important impetus for the development has been the arrival of a new generation of sophisticated, proprietary CRIS platforms. There are also political factors related to changing research evaluation and funding schemes that have increased the attractiveness of these systems. Because of this development, the relationship between CRIS and repository is a timely topic in many countries. The integration of these systems would obviously provide many benefits, but there are many ways to do this. One potential option is to combine the functions of these systems into one single system. This paper looks at the situation in Finland and three other Nordic countries, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The countries are in many ways very similar, and there have been similar motivating factors for the development of both local and national CRIS and repository infrastructure. However, because of slightly different circumstances in each country and the timing of the choices that have been made, they have all ended up with quite different outcomes.