Preparing for CRIS: Challenges and Opportunities for Systems Integration at Finnish Universities

Abstract

This paper raises issues presented by integrating administrative research information to institutional repository (IR) and other systems, especially in the context of Finnish universities. The observations are based on preparing for procurement of a Current Research Information System (CRIS) at the University of Jyväskylä. The CRIS will be used by various stakeholders in different organizational units, having conflicting requirements and different notions on system usage. For example, national reporting affects considerably the publication cataloging conventions. Determining the optimal data flow for handling publications, organizations, or financial information in different systems needs architectural consideration.

While it would be preferable to integrate CRIS and IR to a single system, there are issues with user interface, recording conventions, and selecting the data to be included that may make the task impractical. However, both systems will benefit from synchronization of selected datasets and separation of responsibilities. The overall publication reporting process is problematic in its current form and may need revisions at the national level. Even without a national publication registry, Finnish universities would benefit on services that assist on federated handling of publication data (e.g. publication forum class calculation, determining collaborative publications, transformations for data import/export).