NEWS RELEASE
6th November 2020

“CiNii RESEARCH PRE-VERSION” IS RELEASED:
The preliminary version of integrated search system for a wide rangeof research resources including research data has been released"CiNii Research Pre-version (link: https://cir.nii.ac.jp/)” has been released as thepre-release version of an integrated platform that allows you to search for researchresources in a wide range of fields (Figure1). It has been developed by the ResearchCenter for Open Science and Data Platform (RCOS, Center Director: YAMAJI Kazutsuna,Professor, NII Digital Content and Media Sciences Research Division) of the NationalInstitute of Informatics (NII, Director General: KITSUREGAWA Masaru, Tokyo, Japan).
The service offers cross-sectional search for "research resources" such as research data
published by universities and research institutes on their institutional repositories, dataon academic papers, bibliographic information, and information on research projects. It
employs informatics methods and integrates internal data using identifiers such as DOIs,
creating an environment where users can quickly and seamlessly access variousresources.

CiNii Research Pre-Version https://cir.nii.ac.jp/
Scheduled to be released at 10:00 on Friday, 6 November 2020, JST

Figure1: You can conduct cross-search for a variety of research data and project
information, papers and bibliographic information, and access to relevant
resources quickly on this service

Web: https://www.nii.ac.jp
Twitter: @jouhouken
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Research Organization of Information and Systems
National Institute of Informatics
Publicity Team2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
101-8430 JAPANDirect: +81(0)3-4212-2164 FAX：+81(0)3-4212-2150
E-Mail: media@nii.ac.jp

The "pre-version" released in advance realized "easy access" that allows users tointuitively access to more than 20 million research resources*1, its main content, from a
simple interface (Figure2). In this service, related research resources are linked together
using the unit of search data "entity"*2, making it possible to perform "deep search" thatcollects research data one after another. The system also searches for research data, whichis increasingly made open and utilized in recent years, regardless of the field; therefore, it
is expected that it will contribute to the field of data-driven science and interdisciplinary
research. We aim to provide a service that can be used by many people, including
researchers searching for information on research, librarians handling bibliography andacademic information, and persons in charge of institutions conducting academic research.
This service is still under development for production release; thus, it is a preliminary
release to test the operations for actual operation. We are planning to add more functions
and data and upgrade internal data, and then release it into production after next year.

Figure2: Search Results on CiNii ResearchComment from YAMAJI Kazutsuna, Center Director of Research Center for Open Scienceand Data Platform, the National Institute of Informatics (NII):“This discovery platform plays one of the essential components in the NII Research
Data Cloud (NII RDC)*3. Similar to the progress of open science, the research
environment also has to be evolved continuously. Our big challenge is to realize theshort cycle of development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to mature the NII RDC.
From this perspective, the CiNii Research pre-release means that it just stands atthe start line to realize our concept. It is our great pleasure to reflect on yourexperience and voice for our future development. Let’s think together with us about
what is your deep search.”Research Organization of Information and Systems
National Institute of Informatics

NEWS RELEASE<Media Contact>
Research Organization of Information and Systems
National Institute of Informatics
Publicity Team
TEL: +81(0)3-4212-2164; E-mail: media@nii.ac.jp(*1) It contains more than 10 million bibliographic information, more than 9 million academic
papers, project information, and research data.
(*2) entity: An entity is one of the elements constituting a database or data. It indicates eachconcept that is linked via relationship. In a typical database, data are displayed as a unitof "entry" that does not have a relationship link; in CiNii Research, however, data aredecomposed and recomposed in a unique way to create entities.
(*3) NII RDC (NII Research Data Cloud): The NII RDC is a data infrastructure provided by theNII for managing, publishing and searching research data and related materials generated
in the process of academic research activities. It consists of independent components:
management platform (GakuNin RDM), publishing platform (WEKO3), and searchplatform (CiNii Research).

Research Organization of Information and Systems
National Institute of Informatics