euroCRIS: Organisation, CERIF and Adoption

What euroCRIS is

euroCRIS is an international not-for-profit membership association of research-information professionals, constituted as a Dutch vereniging. It holds custodianship of CERIF, the Common European Research Information Format, and it runs the biennial CRIS conference, twice-yearly Strategic Membership Meetings, the Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS), and an open repository of CRIS literature. It is a community body rather than a software vendor: institutions and individuals pay to join and elect a Board.

euroCRIS also holds the CASRAI Catalogue of Elements, transferred when CASRAI wound down in 2020. That handover is the subject of the next few sections. Further down, this page sets out what the dated public record shows about CERIF’s release history and about how widely it is actually used.

What euroCRIS stewards

euroCRIS holds long-term custody of the CASRAI Catalogue of Elements — the semantically described inventory of data elements used across funding applications, CVs, project management, compliance, research data management, and scholarly communications. The Catalogue moved to euroCRIS when CASRAI wound down in 2020 and was formalised in the joint stewardship statement issued with NISO and CODATA.

The Catalogue is preserved as a public repository at github.com/EuroCRIS/CASRAI-Dictionaries. The repository carries the original element definitions, value lists, and cross-references that the CASRAI working groups produced between 2010 and 2020.

CERIF enrichment

euroCRIS also maintains CERIF, the Common European Research Information Format. CERIF is the exchange model that CRIS platforms — Pure, Symplectic Elements, VIVO, DSpace-CRIS, Converis and a long tail of in-house systems — can be mapped onto. How completely each of them does so varies, and euroCRIS’s own directory does not record it; see the adoption section below. The CASRAI Catalogue and CERIF have a documented alignment that pre-dates the CASRAI wind-down by several years, so the handover continued a working relationship rather than initiating a new one.

In practice the Catalogue is now best understood as a semantic enrichment layer for CERIF-conformant CRIS systems. It is no longer a free-standing dictionary aimed at end-user researchers; it is a developer-oriented vocabulary aimed at CRIS implementers, integration engineers, and the standards staff at research-performing organisations.

How CASRAI's dictionary points to euroCRIS's Catalogue

The Catalogue's canonical home is the euroCRIS repository, not this site. We point at it rather than mirror it.
Where the Catalogue references CRediT roles, the cross-walk aligns with NISO's canonical CRediT role identifiers (see NISO federation) so the same identifiers resolve consistently in both places.
Catalogue–CERIF mappings sit on the cross-walks reference page, which records the entity-by-entity correspondences as they evolve.

Why euroCRIS

euroCRIS was the natural steward for three reasons. First, the existing alignment between the Catalogue and CERIF meant the technical work to bring the two into sustained co-maintenance was already largely complete. Second, the audience for the Catalogue — CRIS implementers, repository managers, and research-information staff at universities and funders — overlaps almost completely with the euroCRIS membership. Third, euroCRIS has the institutional continuity (it has run since 2002) to hold the asset indefinitely without the kind of organisational risk that a smaller successor body would have carried.

Working with the Catalogue

Implementers integrating the Catalogue into a CRIS deployment should start at the GitHub repository and read the per-dictionary README files. The CERIF specification on the euroCRIS site documents the entity model the Catalogue enriches. Where a specific element corresponds to a CRediT role, follow the link through to the NISO CRediT page for the canonical role definition.

Is CERIF still current? The release record

euroCRIS answers this itself. The README of the officialCERIF-DataModelrepository, updated on 28 May 2026, states: “The classic CERIF model is not being further developed. We are focusing on CERIF 2.0, using a more modular approach.” The last released version is CERIF 1.6.1, and the model carries its own dates: the published data-model report for CERIF 1.6.1 records it as created 30 June 2014 andlast modified 31 December 2014. The parallel “current development” model report is dated 22 December 2017 and reports identical dimensions — 295 entities, 1,829 attributes, 671 relationships — so the 1.x line has not changed shape in either branch since 2017. The entity-relationship model file in the repository likewise carries a single commit, dated 29 September 2017.

The successor line is real but unfinished.CERIF-Core, created in December 2020 and last updated on 8 March 2026, describes itself as “the experimental Core of CERIF, the result of the CERIF Refactoring Pilot project started in 2021” and records that it “has not been approved as the official standard yet.” It carries no tags and no releases. Its module repositories were updated in January and March 2026, so the work is genuinely ongoing — five years in, and not yet ratified.

Two supporting artefacts have stopped. CERIF-Vocabularies, which holds the semantic vocabularies the model depends on, has had no commit since 5 November 2020. CERIF-RDF isarchived, last pushed in May 2020.

The exchange profile has fared better. TheOpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers — the CERIF-XML profile a CRIS uses to feed an aggregator — released v1.2.0 on 6 July 2023, and the euroCRIS-maintained validator for it was updated in July 2025.

Who runs a CRIS, and how much CERIF is actually in use

euroCRIS’s own Directory of Research Information Systems held 1,556 entries when we queried it on 24 August 2026, 1,516 of them marked operational. The platform distribution runs IRINS 628, Pure 213, CRIStin 131, in-house-built 85, IRIS 71, DSpace-CRIS 54, Omega-PSIR 54, Dialnet CRIS 49, Symplectic Elements 49, Converis 21, VIVO 20, and a long tail below that. DRIS records no CERIF-conformance field at all — its only facets are country, software and status — so the directory euroCRIS maintains does not itself track whether a listed system speaks CERIF.

One platform demonstrably ships CERIF. The current 4Science DSpace-CRIS distribution branch (dspace-cris-2025_02_x, repository last pushed 20 August 2026) carries anoai_cerif crosswalk plus CERIF-to-internal crosswalks for Person, OrgUnit, Project, Funding, Publication, Product and Equipment; mainline DSpace carries none of them. What the public record does not settle is how many DSpace-CRIS sites switch that endpoint on. euroCRIS’s own DSpace-CRIS repository does not: asked for the oai_cerif_openaire format on 24 August 2026 it returned cannotDisseminateFormat, and none of the twelve OAI formats it does advertise is CERIF — though that instance is a publications repository and the DRIS directory, not an institutional CRIS doing CERIF exchange.

Pure exposes CERIF too, and live sites serve it. Checked on 24 August 2026, the Pure instances at VU Amsterdam and Erasmus University Rotterdam both advertise the oai_cerif_openaireformat against the schema openaire.eu/schema/cris/1.2/openaire-cerif-profile.xsd, and VTT’s Pure endpoint returns live CERIF records in theopenaire.eu/cerif-profile/1.2/ namespace — that is profile 1.2 in production. Whatever else is true of CERIF, “the vendors do not implement it” is not.

The one public register that records CERIF conformance is OpenAIRE, and it has to be read with care. Queried on 24 August 2026, the OpenAIRE Graph listed 22 data sources typed “CRIS System”, six of them at the “OpenAIRE CRIS v1.1” compatibility level and sixteen “not yet registered.” That is a floor, not a total: CERIF-compatible sources also appear under other type codes, so the count of institutions feeding OpenAIRE over CERIF is larger than the CRIS-typed slice.

The registry also cannot show the current profile. OpenAIRE’s controlled vocabularydnet:datasourceCompatibilityLevel contains exactly one CRIS term —openaire-cris_1.1 — so three years after v1.2.0 shipped there is no code with which to record v1.2 adoption. A registry showing everyone at v1.1 is therefore evidence about the registry, not about deployments.

That is the strongest public evidence that CERIF-based exchange is used by a small number of institutions rather than as a default, and it comes with a caveat that matters: OpenAIRE also ingests institutional repositories under a separate set of guidelines, so a university can be fully represented in OpenAIRE without ever running a CERIF endpoint. A low CRIS-endpoint count is evidence about the CERIF route specifically, not about whether institutions publish open research information.

A paper presented at euroCRIS’s own 2026 conference reaches a comparable conclusion from the aggregator side: “Despite long-standing investments in standardisation, (e.g. through CERIF, DataCite, Dublin Core), research information remains fragmented across heterogeneous systems, inconsistently structured, and frequently mediated through proprietary analytics layers” (Tzouganatou et al., CRIS2026, 22 May 2026).

euroCRIS in 2026: the counter-evidence

It would be wrong to read the CERIF release gap as an organisation in decline. On the organisational measures, the record points the other way.

The Board’s update to the CRIS2026 conference (22 May 2026) records 81 institutional and 14 personal members as at 31 December 2025.
The same deck proposes raising fees from 2027: institutional €400 — €500, personal €100 — €150.
Board elections for the 2027–2028 term are underway — candidacies in summer 2026, election procedure in autumn 2026, new Board in office on 1 January 2027.
The 17th CRIS Conference ran at the University of the Azores on 20–22 May 2026 with 120 attendees; the autumn 2026 Strategic Membership Meeting is set for Donostia/San Sebastián in November 2026.
Groups and projects the Board lists as current: AI4RIS, the CRISCROS working group, six CERIF Surgeries held to date, INST-DSpace (funded by the Vietsch Foundation) and CERIF Refactoring.
DRIS is still growing, with new entries deposited during August 2026, and the euroCRIS repository has been upgraded to DSpace-CRIS 9.

The honest summary is narrower than “euroCRIS is becoming irrelevant.” The association is active and solvent; what has stalled is the specification. CERIF 1.x is frozen by euroCRIS’s own statement, and CERIF 2.0 is an unratified pilot five years in. Working CERIF exchange, meanwhile, is real but thin on the ground, and it runs on a profile that OpenAIRE’s own registry has no code for. Those are the facts an institution choosing a data model in 2026 should weigh — a frozen specification with a working export path, not a dead one.

What we could not verify

Stated rather than guessed at. euroCRIS publishes no member count on its membership page, and a search of its repository on 24 August 2026 returned no Board or General Assembly minutes at all; the most recent annual report held there is for 2012. We found no formal release announcement or changelog for CERIF 1.6.1 beyond the model report dates above, and no current published euroCRIS strategy or roadmap document. We confirmed CERIF endpoints for DSpace-CRIS and Pure by direct inspection, but could not establish from public documentation whether Converis or Symplectic Elements expose one, so no claim is made either way; VIVO uses its own ontology rather than CERIF. The absence of a document is not evidence of inactivity and is not treated as such here.