When to apply When the institution is implementing LEAF, My Green Lab, ACT-labelling for equipment, or carbon-footprint accounting for research activities, and needs CRIS-side structured capture of the resulting determinations.
Before you start
Prerequisites
What needs to be in place before you operationalise Sustainable research and laboratory operations terminology in your CRIS or repository.
- A position on which framework is institutionally adopted — LEAF (UCL-originated, widely UK), My Green Lab (US-originated, global), ACT (My Green Lab's product-level scheme)
- Estates-team alignment on how lab certifications surface in the institutional sustainability report
- A controlled vocabulary for lab certification levels (LEAF Bronze, Silver, Gold; My Green Lab certified, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum)
- A baseline emissions methodology — typically the LEAF carbon calculator or the My Green Lab carbon impact tool
- Familiarity with the Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice (UK) or equivalent national commitments
Deployment
Five steps to deploy
Each step is small enough to land in a single sprint or a single sitting with the relevant CRIS administrator. Follow in order.
Define a Lab-Certification entity
A first-class record type with: lab_unit, scheme (LEAF / My Green Lab / other), level, date_awarded, expiry_date, evidence_url, contact_person, parent_organisation_unit (ROR-aligned where applicable).
Capture project-level sustainability flags
On each Project entity, add fields for: leaf_certified_labs_used (multi-link), my_green_lab_certified_equipment, estimated_compute_carbon_kgco2e, travel_carbon_kgco2e, conferences_attended_virtually_percent. These drive sustainability-aligned reporting at the project level.
Add compute-carbon-cost capture for computational outputs
For outputs with significant compute (training runs, large simulations), require a structured estimate of compute carbon cost using a standard tool (CodeCarbon, ML CO2 Impact Calculator, Green Algorithms). Store as kgCO2e on the output record.
Wire the institutional sustainability report
Build a reporting view that aggregates: number of LEAF-or-equivalent certified labs, percentage of researchers in certified labs, estimated annual research-compute carbon, estimated research-travel carbon. This is the metric set the institution's sustainability office actually needs.
Pilot with one school or institute
Pick one academic unit; run LEAF Bronze through Silver for its labs; capture compute and travel carbon for one calendar year; assemble the sustainability report from structured records. Validate against the unit's existing self-reported sustainability snapshot.
Worked example
Sample workflow
A realistic walk-through of a single record passing through the Sustainable research and laboratory operations pipeline once the checklist is in production.
Integration points
CRIS and repository systems
Vendor-specific notes on where this vocabulary fits in real research-information systems. Names appear here only where there is public field evidence — they are not vendor partnerships.
UCL-originated; assessment artefacts can be evidence-linked from the Lab-Certification record. LEAF carbon calculator outputs are the canonical institutional methodology where adopted.
US-originated certification scheme; the My Green Lab Carbon Impact Tool can be cited as evidence on the certification record.
Add Lab-Certification as a custom entity; surface on the Pure Portal so external collaborators can see institutional certification status.
Federation target on the computational side — output records can carry the kgCO2e estimate and the methodology used.
Sustainability module emerging in recent versions; configure Lab-Certification and project-level sustainability flags.
What goes wrong in the field
Common pitfalls
The patterns that show up repeatedly when this checklist is skipped or misapplied. Address these before they become entrenched.
- Capturing lab-certification status as a single field on the lab page rather than as a dated record with expiry
- Treating compute carbon as out-of-scope because "we run on shared HPC" — the carbon cost still belongs to the project
- Mixing LEAF and My Green Lab levels in a single field without recording which scheme — the levels are not comparable
- Letting sustainability flags become read-only post-project so corrections from year-end auditing cannot be captured
- Producing a sustainability narrative for the annual report without backing it with structured CRIS records that can be re-aggregated next year
Frequently asked
Implementation FAQ
- Who maintains this checklist?
- The Sustainable research and laboratory operations working group maintains the checklist alongside the dictionary terms in the same domain. It is reviewed each release cycle (March and September) and updated when a working-group consultation, a vendor product change, or a federation-partner schema update materially changes the operational guidance.
- What if my CRIS or repository is not listed?
- The integration points listed name the systems CASRAI has direct field experience with — Pure, Symplectic Elements, Worktribe, Converis, DSpace and DSpace-CRIS, EPrints, VIVO, Dataverse, Invenio-RDM. The CERIF mapping in the checklist is vendor-neutral and applies equally to other CRIS or repository products. If your system supports the underlying entities (Person, Project, Output, Funding, plus the domain-specific extensions), the steps transfer.
- How do I validate my implementation?
- Three validation surfaces. First, the deposit form should refuse a record missing required fields rather than warn and accept. Second, the resulting metadata should round-trip through the federation layer your institution uses (OpenAIRE Guidelines 4.0 for European federation, DataCite Commons for DOI-anchored discovery, Crossref for article-anchored discovery) without upstream errors. Third, walk a real-world record through the sample-workflow path on this page and confirm the structured fields capture what the prose describes.
- Where do I report errors in the checklist?
- Open a comment via the dictionary-feedback flow at /dictionary/contribute. Editorial corrections — wrong vendor module names, deprecated standards, broken integration paths — are queued into the next release cycle. Substantive disagreements on the operational guidance are routed to the working group for review and may motivate a checklist revision.
- Is this checklist enough to certify my implementation?
- No. The checklist gives you the operational baseline; certification against federation profiles (CoreTrustSeal, OpenAIRE-compliant, COAR-aligned) is a separate process with its own audit. Treat the checklist as the engineering scaffolding and the certification as the institutional sign-off that the scaffolding is being used.
