Dictionary domainTrack B
Research-information systems and integration
CRIS, RIM, CERIF, OpenAIRE, JATS — vendor-neutral terms.
For implementers
Operational deployment checklist for Research-information systems and integration: prerequisites, five deploy steps, integration notes for Pure, Symplectic Elements, Worktribe, DSpace, and more, plus the pitfalls that recur in the field.
Terms in this domain
74 terms
Kerndatensatz Forschung (KDSF)
The Kerndatensatz Forschung (KDSF) is Germany's national standard defining how universities and non-university research institutions structure and report information about research activity -- projects, personnel, publications, funding, and infrastructure -- using a shared base data model (Basisdatenmodell), topic-scoped modules, and standardised reference queries (Referenzabfragen). Voluntary adoption was recommended by the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) in January 2016; ongoing governance now sits with the Kommission fur Forschungsinformationen in Deutschland (KFiD).
Publish or Perish (Harzing’s citation-analysis software)
Publish or Perish is a free desktop program, created by Anne-Wil Harzing and first released in October 2006, that queries academic data sources (as of version 8: Google Scholar, Google Scholar Profile, Crossref, PubMed, OpenAlex, Lens.org, Scopus, Semantic Scholar, and Web of Science) for a given author, journal, or search term, then calculates citation-based metrics such as the h-index and g-index from whatever results are returned. It holds no citation data itself and is not a database, persistent identifier registry, or CRIS -- it is a query-and-calculate client for other providers' data, so results vary by which source was queried and change over time as underlying citation counts change.
Kudos (research-impact platform)
Kudos is a free platform on which an author or institution takes a Crossref-DOI-registered publication and (1) attaches a plain-language explanation of the work, (2) enriches it with supporting links, data, or media, and (3) shares that package through built-in social/email distribution tools, with usage, download, and attention-metric data reported back afterward. It does not register DOIs, host full text, or index the literature itself -- it is an outreach and measurement layer sitting on top of publications already registered elsewhere.
NSF FastLane (Legacy Grants Portal)
NSF FastLane (fastlane.nsf.gov) was the National Science Foundation's original web-based electronic system for proposal preparation, submission, and award administration, launched in the 1990s. A document or workflow is properly described as "a FastLane submission" or "a FastLane-era award" if it was prepared, submitted, or administered through that platform prior to NSF's cutover to Research.gov. As of 2023, FastLane is decommissioned as a live proposal-submission channel: NSF's Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) NSF 23-1 removed FastLane as a submission option for all NSF funding opportunities effective January 30, 2023, and NSF phased out FastLane's remaining functions (award documents, organizational reports, Grants.gov integration) in the months that followed, including a further phase in November 2023. The fastlane.nsf.gov domain now 301-redirects to research.gov, confirming there is no live FastLane instance to submit to. Research administrators encountering the term today are almost always dealing with historical records, legacy award documentation, or institutional process guides that have not yet been updated to reflect the transition.
ISO 18626 (Interlibrary Loan Transactions — Application Protocol)
<p><strong>ISO 18626</strong>, <em>Information and documentation — Interlibrary loan transactions</em>, is the international application-protocol standard for the messages that library systems exchange to request, supply, and track resource-sharing loans and copies between institutions. A transaction qualifies as ISO 18626-compliant when it is carried out as a defined sequence of XML messages — a <strong>Request</strong> from the borrowing (requesting) library, and <strong>Supplying Agency</strong> and <strong>Requesting Agency</strong> status/action messages exchanged between the two systems — rather than as free-text email, fax, or a proprietary, non-standard API. First published by ISO in 2014, revised in 2017, and further revised as ISO 18626:2021, the standard is maintained under ISO/TC 46, the technical committee for information and documentation.</p>
COUNTER 5
COUNTER 5 (formally the COUNTER Code of Practice, Release 5, or 'COP5') is the current international standard governing how publishers, aggregators, and other content platforms must record and report usage statistics — searches, investigations, and requests — for the electronic resources (journals, databases, books, and multimedia items) they license to libraries and consortia. A usage report qualifies as 'COUNTER 5 compliant' only if it is produced from one of COP5's defined Master Report templates, uses COP5's controlled Metric_Types vocabulary, applies COP5's double-click and robot-filtering deduplication rules consistently, and (where automated) is retrievable via the COUNTER API (formerly called SUSHI, the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative). The standard exists so that a usage number from one publisher platform means the same thing as the equivalent number from another, letting libraries compare cost-per-use and make collection-development and renewal decisions on a like-for-like basis.
Esploro (Ex Libris)
Esploro is a commercial current research information management (RIM/CRIS) platform sold by Ex Libris (a Clarivate company). Institutions use it to aggregate and showcase research assets -- publications, datasets, and other outputs -- captured from sources such as ORCID, Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Crossref, alongside researcher profiles, and to expose that data through public-facing research portals, funder/compliance reporting, and open-access workflows. It can be deployed standalone or alongside Ex Libris's Alma library services platform, though the vendor markets it as usable independently of Alma.
Decentralized Clinical Trial (DCT) Platform
A decentralized clinical trial (DCT) platform is the software and connected-service layer that lets some or all trial activities happen away from a traditional investigative site, in line with FDA's trial-conduct model for decentralized elements. In practice a DCT platform is not one thing but an integration of several components under a single participant- and site-facing interface: telehealth/video-visit tooling for remote investigator encounters, eConsent for remote informed consent, home health or mobile-nursing coordination for in-home visits and specimen collection, connections to local or community labs and pharmacies as alternate data-collection or dispensing sites, direct-to-patient (DtP) investigational product (IMP) shipment and chain-of-custody tracking, and eCOA/ePRO or connected devices for participant-reported and sensor-derived data — usually feeding a central EDC and safety database in real time. A trial "uses a DCT platform" when a vendor's connected toolset, rather than a single point solution, is the operational backbone for how remote or hybrid visits are scheduled, conducted, documented, and reconciled against the protocol. The defining administrative complication is that decentralizing activities does not decentralize accountability: the sponsor and the trial's IRB(s) of record remain responsible for GCP compliance, and each local nurse, telehealth clinician, lab, or pharmacy performing a delegated trial activity must be added to the delegation-of-authority log, must practice within a jurisdiction where they are licensed, and must be covered by the same monitoring and oversight expectations as staff at a traditional site.
ARC Research Management System (RMS)
The Research Management System (RMS) is the Australian Research Council's web-based platform for administering the full lifecycle of applications to its National Competitive Grants Program (NCGP): preparing and submitting applications, assigning and recording assessor evaluations, handling applicant rejoinders, announcing outcomes, and managing the resulting grant agreement, including post-award activity such as variations, annual/end-of-year reporting, and final reports. It is accessed at rms.arc.gov.au by registered users, and Administering Organisations (AOs) -- the Australian universities and other eligible institutions through which ARC grants are held -- are generally required to submit NCGP applications through RMS unless the ARC advises otherwise for a specific scheme.
Watermark Faculty Success (Digital Measures)
A commercial faculty activity reporting (FAR) and faculty-lifecycle management platform, owned by Watermark Insights, used by institutions to collect faculty teaching, research, and service activity data once and repurpose it into annual activity reports, CVs, promotion and tenure dossiers, accreditation reports, and public faculty profiles. It was originally sold as 'Digital Measures Activity Insight' before Watermark's 2018 acquisition and subsequent rebrand to 'Faculty Success.'
Journal Citation Indicator (JCI)
A journal's Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) is the field-normalized citation-impact score Clarivate calculates for it as part of each annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR) release. It measures the average citation impact of a journal's citable items published in the most recent three-year window, normalized against the average citation rate for all similarly-aged papers of the same document type in the same JCR subject category. A journal qualifies for a JCI if it is indexed in a JCR-eligible Web of Science Core Collection index (SCIE, SSCI, AHCI, or ESCI) with enough citable output in the relevant window for Clarivate to calculate a normalized rate. The score is a decimal where 1.0 equals the world average for that category and document type: a JCI of 1.5 means the journal's papers are cited 50% more than the world average for comparable papers in that field, and a JCI of 0.5 means cited half as often.
Link Resolver
A link resolver is OpenURL-based library-discovery software that accepts a context-sensitive citation link (from a database, discovery layer, or search engine), checks it against the library's knowledge base of current subscriptions and open-access holdings, and, if a match exists, routes the user to the specific full-text copy that institution has legitimate access to -- rather than to a fixed, publisher-assigned location. It is the software behind a library's "Find It", "Get It", or "Get Full Text" button.
Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG)
A large-scale, free scholarly knowledge graph built and maintained by Microsoft Research — publications, authors, affiliations, venues, and a machine-generated fields-of-study taxonomy, linked by citation and authorship edges, and distributed via the Microsoft Academic website, the Microsoft Academic Knowledge API, and periodic bulk data dumps — that Microsoft fully retired on December 31, 2021, and no longer maintains, updates, or serves in any form.
Metadata enrichment
A record's metadata is enriched when new descriptive, administrative, or relational elements are added to it after initial deposit or harvest — typically by resolving free-text values (author names, affiliation strings, subject terms) against authority files and controlled vocabularies (ORCID, ROR, funder registries, subject-classification schemes), or by pulling additional attributes from an external API (citation counts, open-access status, computed topic classifications). It is distinct from correcting or normalizing values already present (data cleaning) and from the original act of depositing the baseline record (initial deposit) — enrichment specifically adds elements the record did not previously have.
Converis (Clarivate)
Converis is Clarivate's commercial CRIS (Current Research Information System) product: a configurable platform that ingests publication and bibliometric data (including from Web of Science and other sources), manages pre-award and post-award research-project workflows, and exposes a public research-portal layer for institutions, funders, and national research agencies. An institution's software counts as an instance of Converis specifically when it is the Clarivate-branded, vendor-hosted or vendor-configured platform -- not merely any locally-built research-activity database with similar functions.
SciVal
A subscription research-analytics platform, owned and sold by Elsevier, built on Scopus abstract and citation data, that lets research institutions, funders and government bodies benchmark research performance, track collaboration, and analyse societal and funding impact at the level of a researcher, department, institution, country or custom peer group. It is a reporting and benchmarking layer on top of Scopus rather than a separate bibliographic database of its own -- everything SciVal shows is ultimately traceable back to a Scopus record.
InCites
A subscription research-evaluation and benchmarking platform, owned and sold by Clarivate, built on Web of Science Core Collection publication and citation data, that lets research institutions, funders, publishers and government bodies benchmark research performance, track collaboration, and analyse impact at the level of a researcher, department, institution, country, journal or custom peer group. It is a reporting and benchmarking layer on top of Web of Science rather than a separate bibliographic database of its own -- everything InCites shows is ultimately traceable back to a Web of Science record. It is Clarivate's direct counterpart to Elsevier's Scopus-based SciVal.
KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools)
A NISO Recommended Practice (currently RP-9-2014, KBART Phase II) that defines a common tab-delimited data format and field set for content providers to supply title-level holdings metadata — title, ISSN/ISBN, coverage dates, embargo, and URL — to knowledge-base vendors, so that link resolvers and discovery services can accurately determine and display full-text availability.
Je-S (Joint Electronic Submission)
Je-S (Joint Electronic Submission), hosted at je-s.rcuk.ac.uk, is UK Research and Innovation's (UKRI) legacy online system for submitting grant applications and administering research council awards. UKRI's seven research councils used Je-S for close to two decades before progressively replacing it with the UKRI Funding Service (funding-service.ukri.org) from 2023 onward. A form, account, or award is 'in Je-S' when it was created on, or is still being administered through, that older platform rather than the current Funding Service.
RTSM (Randomization and Trial Supply Management)
A system counts as RTSM (Randomization and Trial Supply Management) -- also called IRT (Interactive Response Technology) -- if, within a single platform used by trial sites, it performs at least one of: (1) subject randomization to a treatment arm per the protocol's randomization scheme at enrollment, with blind maintenance and an auditable emergency-unblinding path where the trial is blinded; or (2) trial-supply management -- real-time kit- or dose-level inventory tracking and automatic resupply triggering to sites or depots. Most production RTSM/IRT platforms do both together. A platform that only captures clinical data (an EDC) or only manages site financial, regulatory, and monitoring workflow (a CTMS) is not RTSM/IRT, even though all three are routinely used side by side, and sometimes integrated, on the same trial.
Metadata Schema
A defined, published set of descriptive fields (elements or properties) — each with a name, definition, expected data type or controlled vocabulary, and obligation/cardinality rules — used to describe a resource consistently enough for people and systems to find, cite, exchange, and reuse it. Distinct from a metadata record, which is one specific instance of data filled into that specification.
Scopus Author ID
A Scopus Author ID is a numeric identifier that Elsevier's Scopus database automatically generates and attaches to a researcher's profile once that researcher has two or more documents indexed in Scopus — it is algorithmically assigned from article metadata (name variants, affiliation, subject area, co-authors, citation patterns), not requested or self-registered by the researcher, and a given person can end up with more than one Scopus Author ID if the algorithm fails to match all of their work to a single profile.
Elicit (AI Research Assistant)
Elicit is a named AI research-assistant platform (built by the public benefit corporation Elicit, spun out of the nonprofit lab Ought in 2023) that searches an indexed academic-literature corpus and performs structured evidence-extraction tasks -- summarizing papers, extracting and tabulating data points across many papers with sentence-level source citations, and supporting systematic-review-style screening and data-extraction workflows aligned to PRISMA 2020. It is a specific product, not a generic label for "AI that helps with research" -- distinct from citation-graph discovery tools (Connected Papers, ResearchRabbit) and general-purpose AI writing assistants -- and its extraction/screening output requires independent verification against the source papers rather than being treated as ground truth.
Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)
A journal is considered SSCI-indexed when Clarivate's independent, in-house editorial reviewers have evaluated and accepted it into the Social Sciences Citation Index — the social-sciences-scoped citation index within the Web of Science Core Collection — based on Clarivate's quality criteria (peer review, editorial rigor, timeliness, ethical publishing standards) and its own separate impact/citation-influence assessment. SSCI inclusion is evaluated independently of the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI): a journal is not automatically SSCI-indexed just because it appears in one of those companion indexes, and indexing is not permanent — a journal can later be suspended or delisted if it stops meeting Clarivate's criteria.
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) is an independent, community-curated online directory that indexes peer-reviewed open-access journals meeting its published inclusion criteria. A journal counts as "DOAJ-indexed" only once it has applied and DOAJ's editorial team has evaluated and accepted that application against DOAJ's own checkable standards for genuine open access, documented peer review, an identifiable editorial board, ISSN registration, licensing/copyright transparency, and public disclosure of any author-facing fees -- self-describing as open access, or being under DOAJ review, is not the same claim as being listed.
ResearcherID
ResearcherID is Clarivate's proprietary author identifier for the Web of Science ecosystem: a unique alphanumeric code (format letter(s)-numbers-year) assigned when a researcher creates a Web of Science Researcher Profile, used to disambiguate that person's publications and citation metrics within Web of Science and InCites. Since Clarivate retired Publons as a separate product in April 2022, ResearcherID exists as the identifier component of the unified Web of Science Researcher Profile rather than a standalone product, and (once a researcher explicitly connects the two accounts) two-way syncs publications with a connected ORCID iD.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is Clarivate's annual analytics database and publication reporting citation-based metrics — including the Journal Impact Factor, Journal Citation Indicator, Eigenfactor Score, Article Influence Score, and quartile (Q1-Q4) category rankings — for journals in the Web of Science Core Collection. A figure counts as "the JCR number" only when it is what Clarivate itself calculates and publishes in a specific annual release (e.g. JCR 2026), sourced from Web of Science citation data — not a similar-looking figure mirrored by a third-party site or a metric from a different database such as Scopus.
Dimensions (Research Database)
A record is part of Dimensions when Digital Science's Dimensions platform has ingested it — as a publication, grant, patent, clinical trial, dataset, or policy document — through its largely automated ingestion pipeline (funder data feeds, publisher metadata, patent-office records, clinical-trial registries, and full-text/acknowledgment mining), rather than through the title-by-title editorial selection Scopus and Web of Science apply. Where a funding relationship between a grant and the outputs it produced can be identified, Dimensions represents that link directly in its data model — this explicit funding-to-output linkage is the feature that most consistently distinguishes a Dimensions record from an equivalent Scopus or Web of Science record.
Google Scholar API
Google, as a matter of long-standing, publicly stated policy, does not operate an official, sanctioned application programming interface for Google Scholar -- there is no documented endpoint, no API key registration process, and no rate-limited free or paid tier comparable to those offered by Crossref, ORCID, Scopus, or OpenAlex. "Google Scholar API" as a search term almost always refers to one of two distinct things instead: (1) a third-party commercial scraping service (e.g. SerpApi, Apify, Oxylabs) that queries Google Scholar's public web pages on a customer's behalf and returns the result as structured JSON, or (2) an open-source scraping library (e.g. the Python package "scholarly") that automates a browser or HTTP session against the same public pages with no official sanction from Google. Both categories work by parsing Google Scholar's HTML search-results and profile pages, not by calling an endpoint Google built or documents for that purpose, and both are constrained by Google Scholar's robots.txt disallow rules and general Google Terms of Service language prohibiting automated querying without prior permission.
Web of Science
Web of Science is Clarivate’s citation-indexing and research-discovery platform, not a single index in its own right. A publication counts as covered by Web of Science only once it has been evaluated and accepted into at least one of the platform’s underlying citation indices — most often the Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, or Arts & Humanities Citation Index within the Web of Science Core Collection, or one of the platform’s regional indices — each governed by its own independent Clarivate selection criteria; being published, or indexed elsewhere such as in Scopus, does not automatically make a title searchable on Web of Science.
Scopus
Scopus is Elsevier's proprietary, subscription-based abstract-and-citation database of peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and book chapters, launched in November 2004. A title is "in Scopus" only once Elsevier's Content Selection and Advisory Board has evaluated and accepted it against criteria including peer-review policy, publication ethics, and editorial diversity — inclusion is an ongoing editorial decision, not automatic, and previously indexed titles can later be suspended or discontinued if they stop meeting those criteria.
Gateway to Research (GtR)
UKRI's free, public web portal (gtr.ukri.org) that publishes structured data on UKRI-funded research and innovation projects -- overview, organisations, people, publications, and outcomes -- for all seven UKRI research councils and Innovate UK, distinct from Researchfish, the grantee-facing system through which much of that outcome data is originally submitted.
UKRI Funding Service
The UKRI Funding Service is the single online platform (funding-service.ukri.org) that UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and its seven research councils use to advertise funding opportunities, receive applications, and manage awards through to reporting. An application, account, or award is 'on the Funding Service' when it was created and processed through this platform rather than UKRI's retired Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system, which the Funding Service progressively replaced for competitive research council funding from 2023.
Ecological Metadata Language (EML)
The XML-based metadata specification (current stable release EML 2.2.0) used to document a research dataset, or an associated literature/software/protocol resource, as a single machine-readable package: its identity and citation information, collection methods and sampling design, taxonomic/geographic/temporal coverage, and the structure and attributes of its constituent data tables or other entities. Something is an EML record if it validates against the EML XML schema maintained via the NCEAS/eml specification and describes a dataset (or related resource) at the package level, rather than encoding the individual records within that dataset.
NISO Access and License Indicators (ALI)
NISO RP-22: machine-readable metadata (free_to_read, license_ref) letting systems determine an article's access status and reuse terms without parsing prose.
DOAJ Native XML schema
DOAJ Native XML is the XML metadata format that DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) defines and maintains for publishers to submit article-level metadata directly into DOAJ's index: title, authors and their ORCID iDs, affiliations, abstract, DOI, ISSN(s), volume/issue/page, publication date, and full-text URL. A file counts as an instance of this schema when it validates against DOAJ's own XSD (not a third-party schema) and arrives through one of DOAJ's inbound submission channels — file upload via a publisher's DOAJ account, DOAJ's API, or an OJS (Open Journal Systems) export plugin that generates DOAJ-conformant XML automatically. It is one of two XML dialects DOAJ accepts for article submission, the other being Crossref XML (versions 4.4.2 or 5.3.1); the two cannot be mixed within a single upload file, and a Crossref XML submission must carry an ISSN for DOAJ to process it.
NISO Recommended Practice (RP)
A consensus-based guidance document published by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) that describes an accepted, emerging, or leading-edge method, format, or convention for information exchange. A Recommended Practice is developed through NISO's normal working-group and public-comment process but is approved without the formal ANSI ballot of NISO's Voting Members that a full ANSI/NISO Standard requires, and it is identified with the sequential designation RP-[number]-[year] (e.g., RP-9-2014) rather than the Z39.xx numbering used for Standards.
Researcher Profile Optimization Study (RPOS)
An in-progress Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) initiative, run under FDP's Open Government: Research Administration Data (OG:RAD) subcommittee, that surveys researchers and research-administration offices across FDP's member institutions to document how federally required researcher profile information -- biosketches, current & pending support, and collaborator disclosures -- is captured across agencies and platforms, and to recommend changes that reduce duplicate data entry and support interoperability, research security, and compliance.
Research Data Alliance (RDA)
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a global, community-driven organisation, launched in March 2013 by the European Commission, the US National Science Foundation, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian government, to build the social and technical infrastructure needed for open data sharing across disciplines, technologies, and national borders. RDA operates chiefly through two kinds of groups: time-bounded Working Groups, which typically run around 18 months and produce concrete, adoptable deliverables, and open-ended Interest Groups, which coordinate ongoing discussion, surveys, and less formal outputs across a topic area. Formally endorsed Working Group deliverables are published as RDA Recommendations; less formal outputs from any group type are published as Supporting Outputs. Something qualifies as "RDA" only when it refers to the organisation itself — its membership, governance (Council, Technical Advisory Board, Secretariat), plenaries, and working/interest-group structure — not to any single recommendation, schema, or standard an RDA group has produced, which are distinct, separately citable outputs.
euroCRIS
euroCRIS is the international not-for-profit membership association of research-information professionals and institutions that holds custodianship of the CERIF data model and coordinates community infrastructure (the DRIS directory, the CRIS Conference, membership meetings, working groups) for interoperability among Current Research Information Systems. Something qualifies as "euroCRIS" only if it refers to the organisation itself — its governance, membership, task groups, and services — not the CERIF standard or a CRIS software product it helps make interoperable.
EOSC Federation
The architectural model adopted by EOSC for federating heterogeneous national, thematic, and pan-European research-data infrastructures into a single user-facing layer, with shared identity and access management, monitoring, accounting, helpdesk, and service onboarding.
EOSC Marketplace
The catalogue of FAIR research services accessible to European researchers through the European Open Science Cloud, where service providers register their offerings and researchers can discover, order, and (where applicable) access services with EOSC-federated authentication.
Crossref deposit XML
The XML schema family maintained by Crossref that publishers and content-registration members use to submit metadata when minting Crossref DOIs, with distinct sub-schemas for journals, books, conference proceedings, preprints, peer reviews, grants, and standards.
DataCite metadata schema
The XML/JSON schema (current version 4.x) maintained by the DataCite Metadata Working Group that defines the mandatory, recommended, and optional metadata properties to be supplied when registering a DOI through DataCite.
RIOXX
Research Outputs Information Exchange XML (RIOXX): a UK-originated application profile for institutional-repository metadata, layered on Dublin Core, designed to capture funder, project, and licence information for OA-compliance reporting, currently maintained at v3.0.
MODS
Metadata Object Description Schema: a Library of Congress XML schema for descriptive bibliographic metadata, designed as a richer alternative to Dublin Core and a more flexible alternative to MARC for library, archive, and repository contexts.
METS
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard: a Library of Congress-maintained XML schema for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata for digital library objects, providing a wrapper around content files and metadata sections.
RDF triple store
A database management system specialised for storing and querying RDF (Resource Description Framework) statements — subject-predicate-object triples (or named-graph quads) — typically with a SPARQL query engine on top.
SPARQL endpoint
An HTTP endpoint that accepts SPARQL queries (the W3C-standard query language for RDF) against an RDF dataset and returns results in standard formats (XML, JSON, CSV, TSV), implementing the SPARQL 1.1 Protocol.
Linked Data Fragments
A family of Web interfaces for publishing RDF data — ranging from data dumps through SPARQL endpoints to lightweight Triple Pattern Fragments — designed to allow clients to query large RDF datasets without overloading the server.
ResourceSync
ANSI/NISO Z39.99: a framework for synchronising resources between a source server and one or more destination servers using Web-based sitemaps with extensions for change lists, incremental updates, and push notifications.
OAI-ORE
Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange: a set of specifications, complementary to OAI-PMH, that define how to describe and exchange aggregations of Web resources (a 'compound digital object') using standard Web Architecture and Linked Data principles.
JATS XML
Journal Article Tag Suite (ANSI/NISO Z39.96): an XML vocabulary for describing the textual content and metadata of scholarly journal articles, comprising tag sets for archival (Green), publishing (Blue), and authoring (Pumpkin) use cases.
OAI-PMH
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: a low-barrier HTTP/XML protocol that allows a 'data provider' system (typically a repository or CRIS) to expose its metadata records for incremental harvesting by 'service providers' (aggregators, search services, national portals).
CRIS interoperability
The capacity of CRIS systems to exchange data with each other and with adjacent systems (repositories, funders, publishers, aggregators) through shared data models, schemas, protocols, and persistent identifiers — most prominently CERIF, OAI-PMH, OpenAIRE Guidelines, and PID-based joins.
Affiliation (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, a time-bounded relationship between a Person record and an Organization Unit, capturing the role (employee, visitor, honorary, student), start and end dates, employment fraction, and other contextual attributes of the association.
Organization unit
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a structural component of a research organisation — a faculty, school, department, institute, centre, lab, or research group — with its own identifier, name, parent and child relationships, type, start and end dates, and links to People, Projects, and Outputs.
Person record (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, the entity representing an individual person involved in research — researcher, RA, PhD candidate, or other contributor — with metadata including names (preferred and historical), identifiers (ORCID iD, ISNI, local HR ID), employments, qualifications, and links to outputs, projects, and organisational units.
Project (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a discrete research project with a defined scope, time period, participating people and organisations, funding source(s), and intended or actual outputs — typically the central organising entity for activity-level reporting.
Funding entity
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a specific award or funding instance — its funder, award number, amount, currency, start and end dates, and the project and people it supports — distinct from the abstract Funder organisation and from the project itself.
Research output (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a discrete product of research — a publication, dataset, software release, patent, performance, exhibition, or other recognised output — recorded with its own identifier, type, date, contributors, and relationships to people, organisations, and projects.
Research activity (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a research undertaking — typically a project, programme, or organised research effort — with its own start and end dates, participants, funding sources, outputs, and host organisation, around which CRIS data accretes over the activity's lifetime.
Research entity (CRIS)
A first-class object in a CRIS data model — typically Person, Project, Publication, Organisation Unit, Funding, Equipment, or Activity — that has its own identifier, metadata schema, and relationships to other entities, and that can be managed and reported on independently.
EOSC
European Open Science Cloud: an EU-led initiative and emerging federation of research data infrastructures intended to provide European researchers with seamless, cross-border, cross-discipline access to data, services, and computational resources under FAIR and open-science principles.
OpenAIRE Nexus
An OpenAIRE-led Horizon-Europe-funded initiative (2021-2024) that bundles OpenAIRE services and tools into a coherent service portfolio for delivery through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), targeting researchers, content providers, research communities, funders, and policy makers.
OpenAIRE EXPLORE
The end-user-facing discovery service of OpenAIRE that allows researchers, funders, and the public to search and browse the OpenAIRE Graph by publications, datasets, software, projects, organisations, and funders.
OpenAIRE Graph
An open scholarly knowledge graph maintained by OpenAIRE that aggregates and links publications, datasets, software, projects, organisations, and people harvested from thousands of repositories, journals, and CRIS systems across Europe and globally, with deduplication, enrichment, and link inference applied.
DSpace-CRIS
An open-source extension of the DSpace repository platform, developed by 4Science and the DSpace community, that adds CRIS-style entity management for researchers, projects, organisational units, journals, and other research-information entities alongside the existing repository content.
VIVO
An open-source semantic-web application and ontology developed by the VIVO community (initially at Cornell University, now under DuraSpace/LYRASIS) that publishes information about researchers, departments, publications, grants, and courses as linked open data and as a navigable web interface.
Elements (Symplectic)
A commercial CRIS product developed by Symplectic (part of Digital Science) that automates the discovery, capture, and management of research outputs and activities for individual researchers and institutional reporting workflows, with strong emphasis on researcher-facing workflows.
Pure
A commercial CRIS product, originally developed by Atira A/S in Denmark and now owned by Elsevier, used by universities and research organisations to manage publications, projects, people, organisational units, awards, equipment, and external engagement, and to expose this information through a configurable public 'research portal'.
CERIF
Common European Research Information Format: an EU-recommended data model and exchange schema for research information, developed and maintained by euroCRIS, that defines core entities (Person, Project, Publication, OrgUnit, Funding, Equipment) and the relationships among them with explicit role-and-time semantics.
RIM
Research Information Management: the organisational practice and the supporting systems and processes by which a university or research organisation collects, manages, and uses information about its research activities, encompassing both the technical CRIS layer and the people and policies around it.
CRIS
Current Research Information System: an enterprise-class software system that aggregates, stores, and publishes information about a research organisation's activities — its researchers, publications, projects, funding, equipment, collaborations, and outputs — and exposes that information to internal management and external reporting consumers.
