Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A university library or research office deploying Esploro to automatically harvest a researcher's publications from Scopus and ORCID, then generate a public research portal profile listing that researcher's outputs and metrics.
- Is an instance
A research office using Esploro's open-access compliance dashboard to track which manuscripts still need a repository deposit to satisfy a funder mandate.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Alma, Ex Libris's library services platform for cataloguing and circulation, is not Esploro -- Esploro is a separate research-management product that can be run with or without Alma.
- Not an instance
A bibliographic database such as Scopus or Web of Science is not Esploro, though Esploro ingests records from sources like these rather than replacing them.
Editorial commentary
Esploro is a commercial current research information management (RIM) system, also commonly described as a CRIS, sold by Ex Libris — a Clarivate company. It is designed to help universities and research institutions capture, curate, and showcase their research output and to support related administrative processes such as funder open-access compliance and research impact reporting.
What Esploro does
Per Ex Libris’s own product documentation, Esploro centralizes an institution’s research assets — articles, datasets, conference papers, and other outputs — alongside researcher profile data, then repurposes that combined record for several downstream uses: public-facing research portals that showcase a researcher’s or department’s work, open-access and funder-mandate compliance tracking (flagging outputs that still need a repository deposit), and research impact/assessment reporting. Esploro’s asset-capture process draws on external scholarly data sources including ORCID, Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Crossref, using automated matching (the vendor markets this as ‘Smart Harvesting’) intended to reduce the amount of manual data entry required from researchers and library staff.
Relationship to Alma and other Ex Libris products
Esploro was originally positioned as a companion product to Alma, Ex Libris’s library services platform, sharing some underlying metadata infrastructure. Ex Libris has since made Esploro available to institutions regardless of which library system they run, marketing it as a standalone research-management solution rather than an Alma-only add-on. Esploro is a distinct product from Ex Libris’s discovery and resource-sharing tools, and from Clarivate’s separate citation-index products such as Web of Science and InCites — Esploro consumes data from those sources rather than duplicating their function.
How it fits among CRIS/RIM products
Esploro belongs to the same functional category as other current research information systems, including Pure (Elsevier), Elements (Symplectic/Digital Science), and Converis (also a Clarivate product). Institutions choosing among these platforms are generally comparing overlapping but not identical feature sets — publication harvesting methodology, researcher profile presentation, grants/funder integration, and reporting formats vary by vendor. Esploro is included among the systems represented in the euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS), the community reference listing of CRIS implementations. See CASRAI’s CRIS entry for the general definition of the product category, and CRIS interoperability for how systems like Esploro exchange data with other institutional and funder systems.
As with other commercial CRIS/RIM and faculty-activity platforms covered in this dictionary (see Watermark Faculty Success), CASRAI takes no position on the relative merits of specific vendors; this entry describes the product and its place in the research-information-management landscape neutrally, for research-administration audiences who encounter Esploro in institutional or vendor documentation.
References
- Ex Libris, ‘Esploro Research Services Platform’ product page (exlibrisgroup.com/products/esploro-research-services-platform)
- Ex Libris Knowledge Center, ‘Esploro Overview’ (knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Esploro)
- euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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