A series of photographs from the CIA workshop in October 2012. Apologies for the delay in publishing these.
See Brigitte Joerg’s CERF blog for a beginner’s guide the CERIF and other useful info!
This plug-in was demonstrated at the CiA workshop in London on 19th November.
for more info and a video demonstration.
Attended cross-sector workshop on research information – organised by Snowball project and hosted by Wellcome Trust in London.
Key outcome is that attendees want to see integrated systems across the sector …so enter data once and reuse.
CERIF and Cerif in Action mentioned and particularly the approach involving institutions, funders and suppliers ..a successful and effective partnership.
Barriers identified included the need to engage academic leaders and urge them to lobby funders and government to provide support to some basic practical infrastructure improvements … such funding the adoption of ORCID across the UK.
Attended ROS user forum in Swindon on Friday 30th November.
Understand from Gerry Lawson and Simon Kerridge that RIOXX project due to circulate draft application profile for funder metadata – OA compliance – for Repositories before Christmas; initially DC but also looking at CERIF. RIOXX aiming to comply with OpenAire also but not confirmed yet.
Research Information meets Research Data!
ROS includes data sets as an output so would be good to add this to CiA … so crossover with C4D work.
The session gave an update on the project to date so please note that the actual recommendations may vary from what was said at the session. There are a number of decisions to be made around the ‘who’ and ‘how’ to take the project outcomes forward.
I understood that the project is examining ways to better standardise sharing of information across a wide range of stakeholders for example by defining a standard set of data that will cover all of the requirements of the various funders and government bodies as well as other needs to reduced the burden of reporting.
The HESA Information Landscape Report (2012) noted that similar information is requested from different bodies and it was suggested that a standard approach can’t be imposed but could perhaps be agreed to by collaboration.
The project is due to end in June 2013 and a feasibility study is expected to be released in Jan 2013.
Partners include the British Library and EuroCRIS.
The team have particularly looked at sharing information about projects, outputs, and facilities.
The team have spoken to 41 people (10 reps from HEI’s) and have come up with 231 requirements at this stage. It will be interesting to find out who they spoke to as I am sure there are many others out there with useful information and views on this and I expect that further consultation and linking up of ideas can be done over the coming months.
Further harmonisation of definitions required in CERIF.
Agreement on reporting requirements from key stakeholders would be helpful.
A maximum HEI CERIF profile was suggested – representing everything required in CERIF to facilitate data exchange.
Don’t build a new national system but make existing systems work together better – common API’s, connectors etc.
The final report will go to JISC and from there hopefully some actions and actionees will be agreed – but that is all yet to be decided and joined up with the various initiatives that are working in these areas.
Simon also mentioned the Czech system that takes feeds from institutional systems into a central system.
At euroCRIS membership meeting in Madrid where CiA mentioned as very successful CERIF project and UK engagement with CERIF given credit for much of the increased interest in euroCRIS and CERIF over the last 12 – 18 months.
The CERIF- Task Group recognises that consistent mappings and vocabularies are need to ensure interoperability so will be a focus for the TG over the next period.
The presentations from the CIA workshop are now available.