Pre-print submitted to the Journal of Research Management and Administration (JoRMA)

The Rise of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS): The Case of the Indian Research Information Network System (IRINS)

Pablo de Castro 1,2 * http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6300-1033 Siva Shankar Kimidi 3 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7629-1305 Kannan Palavesm 4 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4121-5919 1 euroCRIS, Heyendaalseweg 141, 6525 AJ Nijmegen, The Netherlands 2 Information Services Directorate, University of Strathclyde, 101 St James Road, Glasgow G4 0NS, Scotland, United Kingdom 3 Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre, Infocity, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382421, India 4 Central University of Punjab Library, Mansa Rd, Bathinda, Punjab 151001, India Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract The paper describes the rapid arising of a national-level research information management infrastructure (RIM) in India as a case study for a bottom-up Current Research Information System (CRIS) implementation strategy. Less than a year and a half after its first launch, the Indian Research Information Network System (IRINS) has become a widespread institutional RIM asset with over 180 instances at Indian research-performing organisations. As a result, India is currently leading the classification by number of CRIS per country in the euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS), followed by Norway and the United Kingdom. As a background to the case study, the broad international CRIS context is also analysed. The causes for the quick rise of such systems are examined, together with their national-level implementation models in various countries and the differences between CRIS and expert finder systems.

Keywords: research information management; current research information systems; CRIS; Indian Research Information Network System; IRINS; India

1. The emergence of Current Research Information Systems The past twenty years or so have seen a remarkable increase in the implementation of so- called Current Research Information Systems or CRIS. These CRIS systems, also known as Research Information Management Systems or RIM systems (Wikipedia 2019), aim to capture as comprehensive a snapshot as possible of the research activity conducted at an institution (usually a university or a research centre), a geographic aggregation thereof (for regional or national CRISs) or by a specific research funder. The way this information is captured is by collecting in a single platform as much metadata as possible on the multiple areas that make up the research effort: people (researchers and academics), organisations (faculties, departments, schools, research institutes, research units, research groups), research projects, research outputs (publications, research data, software, patents), equipment (research instruments and facilities) and many others. All these categories are called 'entities' in the relational data model that underpins CRIS systems. This data model is called the Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) (euroCRIS 2014) and is maintained by a non-profit organisation based in the Netherlands called euroCRIS that was founded in 2002. All these entities are connected to each other forming a so-called research graph: for instance, a publication (say a journal article) is produced by a group of persons (researchers) associated to their organisational units and (potentially) funded by one or several research projects granted by one or various research funders. A research dataset typically underpins the publication and is shared as supplementary material for the article, data that has resulted from the use of a research instrument or facility. The CERIF model is flexible and extensible, meaning that it allows to capture potentially very valuable information for reporting and analysis purposes such as the number of PhD students associated to a specific organisational unit and the number of dissertations produced by such a unit in a given time span. Or the research collaboration patterns for a specific unit with other institutions and research groups, including with industry. Very interesting works are starting to be produced already from the analysis of these data-driven patterns (Elsevier 2015), and this trend will only become more intense in forthcoming years. There are multiple reasons why these CRIS systems have seen such a significant growth in the past few years, some of which are:

 a post-industrial knowledge economy privileges areas of activity associated to data- driven analysis and reporting ;  increased awareness for the need for transparency and accountability for the public funding that supports the vast majority of the research activity carried out at universities and research centres (De-Castro 2017);  need for accurate and comprehensive data on research activity for evidence-based decision-making by the relevant stakeholders (governments, research funders);  subsequent reporting requirements by research funders – for their funding programmes – and by governments via national-level research assessment exercises used to support the funding distribution to universities and research centres;  internal reporting requirements at such institutions for decision-making processes including promotion;  via their front-end platforms, often called research portals, these systems allow research-performing organisations to showcase the research activity they conduct as well as its results. This is important for attracting talent and students, for promoting research collaborations and for highlighting their contribution to society;  increased discoverability of research work and experts helps research funders identify suitable reviewers for the project proposals they receive and allows interested stakeholders (often Industry) to identify possible collaborators for public-private partnerships;  need for a system that allows cradle-to-grave funded project management, i.e. from the preparation of a project proposal to the final research and economic reporting to a specific research funder;  CRIS systems are proving critical pieces of the distributed e-infrastructure required for the implementation of open science. Because institutions need researchers to systematically record their research activity in them, they contain a great deal of information on research publications and data that can be processed by the adequate institutional units (usually research libraries) in order to foster openness and re- usability where appropriate.

The growth of CRIS systems has been particularly significant in Europe, where countries are frequently running research assessment exercises (Sivertsen 2017). These mean that research-performing organisations such as universities need to rely on all-encompassing data gathering systems to report to the government on the quality of their research activity. The way this is done varies across countries: in the United Kingdom, the institutional reporting for the national-level Research Excellence Framework (REF) is composed of lists of the best publications produced at an institution during a period of typically 7 years together with the so-called impact case studies, where a more qualitative approach to the social and economic impact of a given research line is followed via the drafting of specific case studies (HEFCE 2015). The information backing such case studies (research collaborations started, project funding earned, collaborations with industry made possible by a given research effort) is systematically collected from these CRIS systems that gather all the data for the institutional research activity. It's subsequently in Europe where most of the CRIS implementations are based that are collected in the Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS) maintained by euroCRIS (euroCRIS 2020), with countries like Norway, the UK, Italy Poland, Spain or Germany showing a large number of mostly institutional CRISs. It's interesting however to see that in the distribution of available CRISs by country in the euroCRIS DRIS, the country that tops the list is not a European one: it's India. This is due to the very successful and rapid implementation of the Indian Research Information Network System (IRINS) developed at INFLIBNET in Gandhinagar and at the Central University of the Punjab (Siva-Shankar and Kannan 2020). At the time of writing (early June 2020) IRINS already has 184 implementations of its system at Indian research- performing organisations and keeps growing. This nominally makes it the most successful CRIS system in the world, were it not for the fact that it's not CERIF-compliant, meaning that it's not currently able to exchange information across platforms via the regular system interoperability mechanisms that are applied by most CRIS systems in Europe. This paper examines the remarkable expansion of IRINS in India, together with the system features that may allow research institutions to better keep track of their research activity and with the next steps to be taken in order for such a comprehensive system infrastructure to result in a better research administration and management in the country.

Why system interoperability is a key feature of CRISs

In order for the wealth of research information metadata held in this layer of CRIS systems across institutions and countries to be adequately mined and exploited, information exchange standards need to be in place that allow this data to be aggregated. These interoperability mechanisms should allow a more comprehensive snapshot to be obtained for the research being conducted on a given research field beyond a specific institution.

We currently face global challenges like climate change and its impact on (among others) the growth of staple crops. The disruption in harvests caused by the increasing temperatures and the associated droughts are creating multiple social issues that need to be addressed at a global level. It's then no surprise that international scientific institutes devoted to research on these agricultural issues such as the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) or the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) are both based outwith the Western countries where CRIS systems are now mainstream features at research-performing organisations. Key information on funded projects, relevant organisations and important research results in these domains is however often missing, because the data never finds its way into a suitable research information platform able to have it aggregated and shared via the appropriate system interoperability mechanisms.

The widespread implementation of research information management systems like IRINS is then critical for obtaining a more comprehensive snapshot of the research conducted worldwide. In order to be truly useful though, they need to collect as much of internal information as possible on top of that harvested from international data sources such as scientific literature databases and they need to implement the system interoperability mechanisms (the CERIF standard being the most prominent one) that will allow the highly-distributed data to be aggregated and adequately exploited.

2. CRIS systems and University Rankings: the Institutes of Eminence (IoE) scheme in India It's a fact that a properly managed CRIS system can help institutions improve their positions in sector classifications like the QS World University Ranking. This improvement in international rankings is however just a side-effect of the impact that a data-driven management of the institutional research activity automatically has on the visibility, volume and quality of such research activity. By having an accurate snapshot on the way different institutional areas are delivering, a well-informed institutional lead may be able to make the right evidence-based choices in areas like investment, attracting foreign talent or fostering international collaborations by joining internationally funded research projects. The Institutes of Eminence (IoE) scheme in India is one of such initiatives "to empower Higher Educational Institutions to help them become world class teaching and research institutions" (UGC 2017). These initiatives are always bound to be controversial, as their emphasis seems to lie on cross-institutional competition and pitching institutions against each other for a share of the additional funding. However, cross-institutional collaboration may well be as critical for achieving the mid-term goals of such initiatives as the intense competition to get initially selected into the pool of eminent research-performing organisations. Furthermore, there is presently a certain backlash against university rankings among the research administration and management community worldwide (Gadd 2019). This is due to the increasing emphasis on the need to rely on responsible metrics to evaluate research performance (Gadd 2019b) so that some of the perverse effects of using mainstream research evaluation metrics for processes they were never intended to can be avoided. At the same time, university rankings mean a very simple and seemingly equalitarian tool to quantify the progress of institutions and countries towards research excellence, so it's little wonder that initiatives aimed to promote such excellence keep relying on them as the default yardsticks to measure their progress (Begum and Broadhead 2014). One of the main aspects in which the implementation of a research information management system helps an institution improve the quality of its research activity is by allowing it to join a cross-institutional working group in which several organisations, frequently from different countries, are able to discuss best practices for its use. This collaborative exercise is usually carried out via user groups for the specific software solution adopted by a given institution, i.e. these are vendor-driven team working initiatives. For the sake of homogeneity, these user groups tend to be national, since the national-level framework and parameters for research assessment tend to vary across countries and are critical to ensure a common approach. However, many research information management areas are common across countries and it makes sense to have international forums where these can be discussed by institutions running the same CRIS platform. The IRINS team has initially focused on expanding the implementation of the platform across as many research-performing organisations in India as possible, but is simultaneously working on the setting up of user groups that allow research managers across institutions to get training on the IRINS systems features and to discuss common areas of activity. It’s important to bear in mind that CRIS systems are live platforms that need to be fed from the institutions. The workflows for such internal content gathering – usually involving the connection to pre-existing, often scattered institutional systems where the data has been kept in until the arrival of the CRIS – tend to be very similar across institutions and it makes sense for these user groups to discuss best practices in this and other areas. Moreover, the feeding and validation of research information delivered into CRIS systems raises interesting opportunities for professional development within institutions that choose to implement IRINS. It’s not just that adequately running and exploiting the system will require a well-trained research administration and management team at the institution: there are also plenty of ancillary tasks for the system operation and maintenance that will require a tight team-working activity across a number of institutional units, such as IT, the research office and the research library. Research information management is a new professional area – although closely linked to other areas likely to be already pursued at the institution, such as Open Science implementation – and does subsequently foster the emergence of new professional roles linked to a wider research support activity. As per the survey that euroCRIS recently conducted on the matter in collaboration with OCLC, research libraries worldwide are increasingly becoming involved in support tasks with regard to CRIS management and daily operation (Bryant et al 2018). This is because much of the activity around research information management relies on dealing with metadata – for publications, projects and other research entities – and this is an area where libraries traditionally have a great deal of expertise. This is then good news for libraries, which are bound to see new professional opportunities arising from the rise of research information management systems at institutions.

The case of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)

At the time of writing there are 185 entries for Indian CRIS systems in the euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS), making India the top entry in the classification by number of systems per country in the directory. 184 of these are IRINS instances covering Centrally Funded Institutes (CFI), State Universities (SU), Technological Institutes (TI), Private Universities (PU), Colleges, CSIR Labs, ICMR, ICAR institutes and a few R&D institutions. The 185th DRIS entry in India is the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), which operates a different CRIS software solution. This is Elsevier Pure, the single most widespread CRIS platform worldwide. As of early June 2020 there are 161 Pure implementations listed in the DRIS, and although this is a lower figure than the number of available IRINS platforms, an analysis of the geographic distribution of Pure shows it’s being run by institutions all around the world.

The implications of such a widespread availability of this CRIS solution in terms of the opportunities for research-performing organisations to teamwork with fellow Pure users in countries all over the world are very significant, as it offers newcomers the possibility to discuss their next steps with highly experienced research management and administration colleagues in advanced countries.

A MAHE representative had in fact the opportunity to deliver a presentation (“Pure in the journey of MAHE towards Institute of Eminence”) at the highly international Pure International Conference in Prague (Czech Republic) in October 2019 (Venkata 2019). Being part of an international user group – even an informal one – for a CRIS solution shared by such a high number of institutions in various countries means an invaluable opportunity to explore the way a CRIS system implementation may improve the institutional research performance (together with its position in the international university rankings).

The well-informed decision-making arising from these international discussions is already showing in aspects like the Manipal Read and Publish (Springer Compact) agreement (MAHE 2020). These R&P tools to increase the impact of the institutional research publications by ensuring they get published Open Access are rarely available outside Europe at the moment, and the Manipal agreement shows an awareness of the value of Open Access for achieving research impact. Not to mention an opportunity for a wider Open Science implementation at the institution and the possible emergence of new professional roles at its research library.

From a national perspective, it would be extremely useful for the improvement of the institutional practices in the area of research management if user groups were not limited to a specific software solution but institutions running different platforms were able to collaborate in discussing and furthering their goals.

3. The Indian Research Information Network System (IRINS) The information on faculty members, scholars and their research activities is frequently scattered across various institutional systems such as the HR system, identity registry, institutional repository and others. It is the responsibility of the research-performing organisation to collect the institutional research artifacts from different sources and showcase them to the research community, as well as to make use of this data for the decision-making process on funding and policy-making. However, collecting the research-related data from the organisation and integrating it with external sources for assessing the impact of the research carried out by the faculty members and organisations is a cumbersome task. Faculty members and organisations face difficulties when trying to identify similar experts within the organisation and across the country for collaborative research in various domains. This is where Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) come into the picture with the aim to consolidate the research activities and provide aggregate data on research and its impact. The process to implement an institutional CRIS requires some technical expertise and may benefit from some external support. The Indian Research Information Network System (IRINS) is a Current Research Information System initiated under the leadership of Mr Kannan, Scientist C at the Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET), Gandhinagar in September 2017. In September 2018, the IRINS project received financial support within the National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT) (MHRD 2018) for its implementation at higher education institutions in India. IRINS was subsequently executed as a collaborative project by the INFLIBNET Centre in Gandhinagar and the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda. IRINS allows academic and R&D organisations to collect scholarly communication activities such as research-performing faculty and their affiliations, projects, honours and awards, publications and patents. An institutional scholarly network arises as a result, as well as – eventually – a national level network when different institutional data sources are aggregated. IRINS supports the integration of internal and external data sources. Among the former there are institutional databases such as the HR system, course management, grant management system or the institutional repository, whereas external data sources may include among others a citation database, the academic registry, national and international preprint archives, etc.

3.1. Need for and benefits from IRINS According to the Scopus international database of scientific literature, the total number of research publications produced by Indian authors is 2.25 million as of 2020 (Elsevier 2020). Nearly 0.29 million of these publications have been published in open access journals. There is no common open data source available to assess the research contribution at the different institutional levels such as faculty members, department or organisation. Centrally- funded institutes started using the institutional repository to archive the research outputs of the organisation, but faculty members and scholars proved not too proactive in providing content to their respective repositories. There are several major stakeholders to get direct benefits from the CRIS system:

 Students. The students and research scholars wish to know the research expertise of the faculty members and departments before joining the institute for higher studies.

 Faculty members. The faculty members wish to disseminate their research contributions to their peers and to create the scholarly network for the collaborative research. Faculty members also wish to attract funding opportunities from the national- and international-level funding agencies in their research domain.

 Research administrators. The research administrators require research-related data for the assessment of the faculty members and departments for promotion and decision-making on funding. Research administrators need to generate reports on research performance often required by the Heads of the institutes and by the funding agencies. A growing emphasis is also being placed on national- and international-level rankings such as the Times HE University Ranking, the QS Ranking, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), the Atal Ranking of Institutions on Innovation Achievements (ARIIA) and the Institution of Eminence (IOE) initiative. This is pressing individual organisations to collect and aggregate their research-related information, so that it can be used for various analysis.

Subscriptions to international research literature databases are continuously increasing as a result, and this is not an affordable trend for the individual academic institutions. As of 2020, there are over 40,000 higher education institutions in India and hardly 1% of these institutes have access to citation databases such as Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS). A centrally- provided institutional CRIS is able to provide a greater and more affordable insight into the research contribution of the faculty members and its impact in the society. The IRINS provides much visibility to the scholarly work by the respective institutes and encourages collaborative and interdisciplinary research across academic organisations.

3.2. IRINS: Key features and functionality

IRINS is the cloud-based, centrally-provided Current Research Information System to collect and curate metadata on the faculty and their research activity. The system provides faculty, departmental and institutional profiles with numerous analytics such as research productivity, co-author network, citations, h-index and social media analytics. Some of the major features and functionalities available in IRINS are:

 Admin dashboard to manage the faculty profile and its visibility, export faculty profile for data curation and import publications and citation data from external databases;

 Integration with external academic identity registries and international research literature databases such as ORCID, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, CrossRef, Scopus and Web of Science to retrieve publications and citations;

 Retrieval and display of citation metrics and social media metrics from Google Scholar, Altmetric and Dimensions;

 Enhanced faculty profile with research productivity, co-author network, list of publications, publication venues, citations, h-index, links to open access articles, etc;

 SOLR-based faceted search engine to search desired profile with various filters such as areas of expertise, designation, department, etc;

 Institute-level profile with total number of publications, publication venues, cumulative citations, highly cited authors, highly cited papers, comparison across departments.

3.3. IRINS implementation as institutional CRIS at research-performing organisations in India

The first IRINS prototype was developed in January 2018 and implemented at Pondicherry University, Pondicherry with limited features. The full-fledged system was ready by September 2018. Subsequently, more institutions joined the IRINS initiative, with rigorous updates and multiple added features. There were continued dissemination activities such as national- as well as regional-level workshops on IRINS to raise awareness of RIM and its importance for higher education institutions in India. These dissemination activities were supported by communications from the Ministry of Human Resource Development to the centrally-funded institutions, and a growing number of these subsequently showed an interest in using IRINS. Gradually, an increasing pace of growth emerged for the setting up of the IRINS instances in all the states and union territories across the Indian higher education system, which includes centrally funded institutions, state universities, private universities, R&D organisations etc. The figure below shows the wide expansion of IRINS instances in various locations in India.

Fig 1. IRINS instances on the euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS) as of mid-Mar’2020

IRINS Case Study: Indian Institute of Technology Madras

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai is one of the pioneer engineering institutes in the country. The IITM was one of the Institutes to be recognised as an 'Institution of Eminence (IoE) under the MHRD initiative. An institutional Research Information Management System called “IIT Madras Scholars Profiles” (IIT Madras 2020) was implemented in March 2018 at the IITM using the Indian Research Information Network System (IRINS). The IITM Scholars Profiles CRIS allows the research administrator to collect the faculty information from the HR system and academic identity from the faculty members. The system also enables the generation of various reports based on publications, citations and h-indexes. With the global aim of increasing the visibility of the scholarly communication activities of institutional faculty members and scholars, the system generates numerous graphics to provide new insights into research data such as authors’ productivity, authors’ citations, h-indexes, co-author networks, department profiles with cumulative citations, publication venues and departmental productivity. As on 27th May 2020, the IITM Scholars profile contains 593 faculty profiles, 26,336 publications and 314,617 citations from CrossRef (IITM Library, 2020).

4. CRISs in India: an example for the emergence of a bottom-up research information management infrastructure There are multiple models for the emergence of a comprehensive national-level research information management infrastructure. Because institutions tend to be more agile in their IT implementation projects than national offices and because they can easily see the case for operating an institutional CRIS, the most frequent case involves the gradual implementation of various institutional CRIS solutions that are sometimes aggregated into a national platform at a later stage. This content aggregation is based on system interoperability standards that are much easier to implement the more homogeneous the institutional CRIS layer is, but there are also multiple cases where different CRIS solutions are aggregated via specifically designed information exchange mechanisms. The most recent of these latter cases is the Finnish Research Information Hub (Puuska 2019) currently being developed by the CSC Centre in Espoo and the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture as a national-level portal for collecting research information on Finnish researchers, organisations, projects, publications, research data and equipment on top of a diverse institutional CRIS (with instances for Pure, Converis and SoleCRIS) and repository layer. The Flemish Research Information System (FRIS) in Flanders, Belgium, provides another good example for CRIS aggregation (Van-Campe 2019). The development of national CRIS infrastructure tends to follow two basic models: top-down and bottom-up:

 The top-down model usually involves the implementation of a national CRIS as a means for the research information for a whole country to be made openly available. National CRIS platforms of this kind may also develop institutional portals where the specific research information for a given institution is filtered from the national platform. Two-way information exchange mechanisms usually follow that allow the institutional instances to be directly fed by the research support staff at research- performing organisations in turn enriching the national CRIS. The best example for such an infrastructure is the CRIStin national CRIS in Norway (Karlsen 2019). There are also multiple examples for national CRIS platforms without institutional portals, such as SK-CRIS in Slovakia or ETIS in Estonia. In those cases, researchers are typically asked to directly deliver their research information into the national system.

 The bottom-up model starts by implementing the same CRIS solution in as many institutions in the country as possible. The availability of the same platform across institutions significantly simplifies its maintenance and also the setting up of user groups. This model was first implemented in the Netherlands with the widespread adoption of the METIS CRIS platform across Dutch universities. The approach was later abandoned in favour of a more diverse CRIS landscape where institutions would choose the most suitable solution to their specific needs, but the model was successfully disseminated at the time and seen as a solution worth replicating in other countries. CRIS solutions like the Italian Research Information System (IRIS) developed at CINECA and widely implemented at Italian Higher Education Institutions subsequently followed this model (Ferrario 2018).

Actual implementation strategies for a national CRIS infrastructure rarely follow these somewhat simplified models and rather tend to be a mix of both, with national CRIS often being developed simultaneously to the institutional solutions. Countries where a national CRIS infrastructure is currently being implemented such as Croatia, Israel, New Zealand or Peru usually explore the range of approaches taken by previous projects and take their unique route forward, often re-using specific aspects of previous initiatives but mainly trying to cater their own needs. It is worth highlighting the fact that projects for building a national research information management infrastructure led from public offices will often rely on in-house-built CRIS solutions over vendor-provided ones. Keeping control over the development of the CRIS solution is frequently seen as the best way to tailor its features to meet the specific needs identified by the project, while simultaneously allowing the local IT expertise to be built. In the case of the CRIS infrastructure in India, the Indian Research Information Network System (IRINS) approach has followed the bottom-up model described above and has strongly made the case for an in-house-built and maintained solution. With a September 2018 date for the release of the first fully-fledged version, the most remarkable feature of the IRINS implementation model is the speed at which it has been adopted by over 180 research- performing organisations in the country. The fact that all IRINS instances are currently centrally hosted at the INFLIBNET Centre in Gandhinagar helps explain such a quick pace of adoption, but there are plans to release it as a fully-fledged open source CRIS solution and to gradually transfer the platforms to local servers hosted at institutions. Even in a situation where over 180 instances of the IRINS CRIS have been implemented at institutions all around the country, the bottom-up snapshot is not so clear-cut. This is because the Vidwan Expert Database and National Researcher's Network (Vidwan 2020) – with over 25,000 faculty profiles by 2017 after the project was launched in 2013 – was already being hosted at the INFLIBNET Centre before the IRINS solution started being implemented. With researchers, organisations and publications in its data model, Vidwan in fact represents a national CRIS of sorts which IRINS partially draws from to start with (researcher directories are later completed from institutions whenever there are gaps in the national database). This means that, same as in other countries, the emergence of the CRIS infrastructure in India is again following a mixed bottom-up and top-down model simultaneously. A specific feature of the way the CRIS infrastructure is evolving in India is its strong emphasis on expertise discoverability. This is partially a consequence of having the Vidwan Expert Database as a starting point, but it's also a conscious choice that led to the consideration of VIVO as a possible institutional CRIS platform to roll out. The INFLIBNET Centre conducted two 3-day workshops on implementing VIVO as an institutional RIM system in Nov 2015 and Aug 2017 (INFLIBNET 2017). VIVO is the semantic based profile information management system and multi-institutional project funded under the National Institute of Health to collect the faculty information and create the scholarly network. As per the DuraSpace directory (DuraSpace 2020), there are 175 institutions using VIVO as RIM system to disseminate their research contribution to the scholarly community – three of these institutions from India.

Fig 2. The case for expertise discoverability as a major CRIS feature (slides: F Ferrario, CINECA)

As per the definition of a CRIS internally provided within the euroCRIS CERIF Task Group back in 2010 ("A CRIS is an information system that – when mapped to CERIF – populates at least three of the following five entities: Person, OrgUnit, Project, Publication, Funding"), both 'standard' CERIF-compliant CRIS based on relational databases and expert finder systems based on ontologies and RDF technology would constitute a CRIS. However, while item number 7 on the list of reasons for the quick growth of CRIS systems in recent years on section 1 above mentions the increased discoverability of research work and experts, the CRIS aim to support the reporting requirements by research funders and by governments via national- level research assessment exercises listed on item no 4 is not that well addressed by expert finder systems. Where there are no REF-like national-level research assessment exercises (markedly in the United States, but also in India), an expert finder system can function like a CRIS (with funder-led platforms like Chronos or Researchfish filling in the gaps for reporting to research funders – as a rule, directly from researchers, although institutional CRISs have a role here too (Clements et al. 2017)). It is then worth pointing out again that besides the 184 institutional IRINS implementations as of early June 2020 with more than 32,000 faculty members interconnected through this system, India also has one institutional implementation of a ‘standard’ CRIS based on Pure (Venkata 2019). The coexistence of both models will no doubt allow for some cross- fertilisation in the area of best practices towards increasing the socio-economic impact of the institutional research activity, and there are plans in any case for a mid-term expansion of the IRINS data model in order to make room for additional CERIF entities such as funded projects.

IRINS and euroCRIS

The Indian Research Information Network System (IRINS) came to the attention of euroCRIS during the International Conference on the Changing Landscape of Science and Technology Libraries (CLSTL) held from Feb 28th to Mar 2nd, 2019 at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar (CLSTL 2019). An IRINS presentation (Kannan and Siva- Shankar 2019) was held at this conference alongside a talk on the use of RIM systems for Open Science implementation by the euroCRIS Secretary (De-Castro 2019). The first instances of institutional IRINS implementations started then being added to the euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS). In August 2019 INFLIBNET joined as an institutional member of euroCRIS (euroCRIS News 2019), and on Aug 20th euroCRIS contributed a talk on "The Role of Research Information Management in Capacity Building" to the full-day workshop for IRINS users that took place at INFLIBNET. An IRINS presentation was in turn remotely delivered at the most recent euroCRIS membership meeting held Nov 18-20, 2019 in Münster (Germany). euroCRIS is aware of other projects aiming to implement a national CRIS infrastructure in various countries, and aims to keep a close collaboration with INFLIBNET and IRINS. This should eventually lead to a session to highlight the remarkable pace of the system implementation at Indian institutions and to discuss how national projects in different countries are addressing similar challenges around increasing the availability, visibility and interoperability of their research information.

5. Next steps in the definition of a research information management strategy The national CRIS infrastructure in India has seen a massive expansion during the last year, especially via the implementation of IRINS as an institutional Research Information Management System at most research-performing organisations in the country. However, the availability of the institutional CRIS systems is but a first step in the definition of a research information management strategy based on the data collected in and showcased from the CRIS systems. Some of the next challenges to address would include: i) Consolidating the CRIS infrastructure in the country both from a technical and from a human resource perspective. This involves on the one hand completing the expansion of IRINS so that it covers all major research-performing organisations in India. On the other hand, a parallel effort needs to be devoted to the training and coordination of the professionals (research administrators and librarians) that deal with the analysis of the research-related indicators at institutions. This is to ensure that best practices gradually arise in areas like assessing the social and economic impact of the research conducted in them or mapping the national and international collaboration networks in different research areas. It would also be important to ascertain the influence of IRINS or other CRIS platforms in increasing the visibility and the effectiveness of the research activity carried out at research-performing organisations, including an eventual and gradual improvement in the national and international university rankings. ii) Collecting and displaying information on funded projects by local research funding agencies in the country. As opposed to the data on research publications and citations taken from international research literature databases like Scopus or the WoS, the information on funded research projects needs to be locally sourced. This effort involves liaising with the appropriate stakeholders (funding agencies) and ensuring that the appropriate information exchange mechanisms emerge to allow standard funded project metadata to find its way into the institutional CRIS systems. Once the information on funded projects starts being regularly collected into these platforms, it will be much easier for research funding agencies to collect information on research publications and to measure the social and economic impact resulting from specific funded projects. iii) Making the data model underpinning IRINS compatible with the international CERIF standard for research information. This will not only allow the different 'CERIF entities' collected in the CRIS (such as persons, organisations, projects or research outputs) to be systematically linked to each other, it will critically also allow the information to be exchanged and aggregated on a cross-institutional and eventually on an international basis too. iv) Building bridges with wider initiatives in the Indian research and innovation ecosystem like the India Research Management Initiative (IRMI) launched by the Wellcome Trust/DBT (Department of Biotechnology, Government of India) India Alliance in February 2018 (Ayyar and Jameel 2019). The IRMI aims to strengthen and professionalise a network of institutional Research Managers and Administrators working in areas like supporting grant management, innovation management, financial management or policy development and research ethics in India. A specific feature addressed within this initiative is the ability to provide Indian researchers the required support for successfully competing for extramural funding. The availability of the research information collected at institutional CRIS systems should be of great value for such purposes. v) Exploring a first national-level case study for research information management in a specific research field. It’s not infrequent for countries to excel in specific research-related domains. As an example, Chile plays a major role worldwide in the field of Astronomy & Astrophysics ("within its borders, Chile currently houses nearly all major European telescopes and perhaps 50 percent of the observation capacity of countries such as the United States, Canada, and increasingly Japan" (Rodríguez-García-Huidobro 2017)). The local academic impact of such a relevant role in a specific research and innovation niche may be estimated by means of a set of research indicators such as (among others) number of local PhD students, research outputs and collaborations in which local researchers are involved or number of collaborations between Academia and Industry in that specific area.

Institutional CRIS systems like IRINS provide a good starting point for collecting these research indicators, which should then be aggregated to produce the indicators that will provide a national-level snapshot for the academic footprint of the research activity in a given area. With most research-performing organisations in India sharing the same IRINS system for collecting their research information, the main requirement to appropriately collect this data is to have the necessary system interoperability standards in place that enable its cross- institutional aggregation.

Acknowledgements SSK and KP wish to acknowledge the support of the Indian Research Information Network System (IRINS) project funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India under its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT), grant number 501100004541.

Author contribution statement Authors contributions are as follows; Conceptualization, PDC and KP; Writing, PDC, SSK, KP; Supervision, PDC

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