The Importance of CRIS in Promoting the Visibility of Data Publications
Creators: name: Hauck, Reingis
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019
Subjects: CRIS
Datasets
Visibility
Pure (Elsevier)

description: <em>Abstract to a lightning talk at the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) in Melbourne in 2019 </em>

In order to enhance researchers’ commitment to research data management it has to be ensured that their activities do not go unnoticed. Current Research Information systems (CRIS) play an important role in the showcase of the research outputs of individual researchers as well as of research institutions. Moreover, CRIS play an important role in linking projects, publications, equipment, datasets and researchers and therefore deliver important additional information.

Unfortunately, the development of CRIS does not always keep pace with the demand of easy workflows to incorporate information on data sets. This has been confirmed by the “Survey of Research Information Management Practices” which was jointly carried out by euroCRIS and OCLC Research from October 2017 to January 2018. Findings show a low rate of 16% interoperability of CRIS and data repositories.

At Leibniz University Hannover in Germany, we are in the process of implementing Pure (Elsevier) as our CRIS. In Pure a high variety of information on research outputs can be collected, i.e. metadata of text publications, projects and luckily datasets. Shortly after the decision to use Pure as our CRIS, we started with the implementation of a research data management strategy at our university. The strategy includes the build-up of an institutional data repository as well as a comprehensive support structure ranging from guidance to training to in-depth consultancy throughout the data life cycle provided by a "virtual" service unit composed of staff in the research office, the library and IT services. Right from the beginning, we recognized the importance of a researcher friendly integration of our CRIS with the data repository. Our aim is to have a complete metadata catalogue of our researchers’ datasets and to display them via our portal <em>Research@LeibnizUniversity</em>. We see this also as a part of an overarching strategy to work out how to better acknowledge and award data management activities.

As we do not intend to limit researchers to an institutional repository but to include metadata of other data repositories into our CRIS, we are interested in a solution that would enable us to synchronize easily metadata of datasets from different sources with Pure. For this reason, we are about to abandon the idea of programming specific interfaces between our CRIS and our institutional data repository and to address the interoperability issue from a more global perspective. As DataCite is providing the DOIs for the datasets in our institutional repository as well as for many other data repositories worldwide, we now aim for DataCite as a synchronization source for our CRIS. So far, the import of metadata of datasets in Pure has been very limited and only works only via an xml interface/ upload or via Mendeley Data. Pure is one of the leading commercial CRIS but so far Elsevier has not yet realized the integration of DataCite as a source for metadata of datasets even though users increasingly start to ask for this integration.

<strong>Conclusions</strong>


	As CRIS play an important role in the ecosystem of research information infrastructures we all should put in more efforts to incorporate the metadata of our researchers’ datasets into our CRIS in order to increase the visibility of data publications and enable the development of award systems for data set publications.
	Instead of local solutions in the integration of local repositories and CRIS, I would like to propose a more general approach and to use Datacite’s metadata store as a very comprehensive source.
	As the vendor of one of the leading commercial CRIS Elsevier should consider Datacite as a generic import source for metadata of datasets in Pure.