CroRIS: Croatia's National CRIS Explained

CroRIS (Croatian Research Information System, Croatian: Informacijski sustav znanosti RH) is the national current research information system (CRIS) for Croatia. It is the single point of reference for data on Croatian researchers, research institutions, funded projects, research equipment, and research outputs, and it now incorporates the country’s long-standing scientific bibliography, CROSBI, as one of its modules rather than as a separate standalone system.

For research administrators working with Croatian institutions, applicants to Croatian national funding calls, or anyone building interoperability between national CRIS platforms and international persistent-identifier infrastructure, CroRIS is the system of record to know.

What CroRIS is

CroRIS is built and operated as a joint national infrastructure. Development began in 2017 as a strategic project of Croatia’s science ministry, with the University of Zagreb’s University Computing Centre (Sveučilišni računski centar, SRCE) as the technical partner responsible for building and maintaining the platform, and the Center for Scientific Information at the Ruđer Bošković Institute (RBI) — the body that had built and run CROSBI since 1997 — joining the CroRIS development effort from the end of 2021. The project was co-financed through the European Union’s European Regional Development Fund. Rollout was phased rather than a single cutover: the Projects module, for example, took over project and funder data migrated from the earlier POIROT information system on 14 June 2020, with other modules brought online over the following years.

The system is organized into discrete modules that map onto the different entity types a CRIS is expected to hold: People, Institutions, Projects, Equipment and Services, Bibliography (CROSBI), and Journals/Events, among others. This modular structure mirrors the entity model used in CERIF (the Common European Research Information Format maintained by euroCRIS), which most European national CRIS platforms — CroRIS included — align with to enable cross-system exchange of person records, project records, and research output records.

CroRIS and CROSBI: successor, not replacement

CROSBI (Hrvatska znanstvena bibliografija, the Croatian Scientific Bibliography) predates CroRIS by two decades. It was established in 1997 by the Ruđer Bošković Institute’s Center for Scientific Information and has served since then as Croatia’s national bibliographic database and repository of scientific publications. It is important to be precise about the relationship: CROSBI has not been shut down or replaced by a different product. Instead, it has been re-implemented as the Bibliography module inside CroRIS, alongside sibling databases the same RBI center previously ran independently — including Šestar (the register of scientific research equipment) and POIROT (project and funder data), both of which now correspond to CroRIS’s Equipment and Projects modules respectively.

In practice this means a publication record that once lived only in the standalone CROSBI interface is now a bibliography entry inside CroRIS, cross-linked to the person, project, and institution records that generated it. Anyone who bookmarked or cited CROSBI directly should expect that content to now be reachable through CroRIS’s Bibliography module rather than through a fully separate standalone site. CASRAI covers the same successor pattern elsewhere in this cluster: Norway’s national system went through a comparable consolidation when NVA replaced Cristin, and Slovenia runs a structurally similar split between SICRIS and COBISS.

Governance

CroRIS governance sits with three parties acting jointly: Croatia’s ministry responsible for science (the portfolio has been reorganized and renamed more than once in recent years — it currently operates as the Ministry of Science, Education and Youth, having previously been styled the Ministry of Science and Education), which sponsored the original strategic project and sets national science-policy requirements the system serves; SRCE (University Computing Centre, University of Zagreb), which builds and technically operates the platform day to day; and the Ruđer Bošković Institute’s Center for Scientific Information, which contributes the bibliographic, equipment, and legacy-project data and domain expertise it accumulated running CROSBI, Šestar, and POIROT. Because ministry naming in Croatia has changed more than once in this period, treat the specific ministry name as time-sensitive and verify the current designation directly at mzom.gov.hr or croris.hr rather than assuming this page’s wording stays current indefinitely.

Role in research evaluation and funding applications

CroRIS functions as Croatia’s authoritative source of researcher, institution, and output data for national science-policy purposes — the kind of role a national CRIS typically plays once it consolidates what used to be scattered, institution-specific bibliographies and project registers. Two consequences follow for anyone navigating Croatian research administration:

Publication and output tracking for funded projects. Croatia’s national research funder, the Croatian Science Foundation (Hrvatska zaklada za znanost, HRZZ), draws on CROSBI/CroRIS bibliographic data to track publications produced under the projects it funds, and its project-proposal guidance references linking submissions to CroRIS records (for example, equipment listed in a proposal is expected to be identifiable via CroRIS). Researchers applying to HRZZ calls or reporting on active HRZZ awards should expect their CroRIS person and bibliography records to be the reference data source funders and reviewers check against, rather than a CV or self-reported list submitted separately.
Institutional and national statistics. Because CroRIS aggregates People, Institutions, Projects, and Bibliography data centrally, it is the dataset Croatian state administration bodies use to compile science-system statistics and inform science policy — the kind of national reporting role that, in other CERIF-aligned systems, similarly underpins funder decision-making and open-science monitoring.

Because reporting expectations and specific mandate language can change between funding cycles and are set by the ministry and by individual funders rather than by CroRIS itself, always confirm current requirements against the specific funder’s call documentation (for HRZZ, its own published “Upute za prijavitelje” application guidance) rather than relying on general description alone.

How CroRIS fits the broader CRIS/CERIF landscape

CroRIS is one of a growing number of national CRIS platforms built on CERIF-compatible entity modeling, alongside systems like Slovenia’s SICRIS and Norway’s NVA. For research administrators working across borders, the practical implication is the same one that applies to any CERIF-aligned national system: Croatian researcher, project, and output records in CroRIS are structured in a way that is designed to interoperate with international persistent identifier infrastructure — ORCID for individuals and ROR for institutions chief among them — rather than existing as an isolated national silo. Anyone doing cross-institutional data matching, funder reporting, or evaluation work involving Croatian researchers should expect CroRIS person and institution records, not a separate CROSBI export, to be the current authoritative source.

Frequently asked questions

Is CROSBI still a separate website from CroRIS?

No. CROSBI’s data and functionality now live inside CroRIS as its Bibliography module. CROSBI content is reachable through the CroRIS platform rather than through a fully independent standalone system, though legacy links and references to “CROSBI” by name persist because the underlying database and its 1997 origin haven’t changed, only its technical home.

Who manages CroRIS?

SRCE (University Computing Centre, University of Zagreb) builds and operates the platform, working jointly with Croatia’s science ministry, which sponsored its development, and the Ruđer Bošković Institute’s Center for Scientific Information, which contributes bibliographic and legacy-database expertise from its years running CROSBI, Šestar, and POIROT.

Do Croatian researchers have to use CroRIS?

CroRIS functions as the de facto authoritative record for Croatian research outputs, projects, and personnel used by national funders and science-policy bodies, and national funding calls (such as those run by the Croatian Science Foundation, HRZZ) reference CroRIS records as part of the application and reporting process. Exact mandate language varies by funder and institution and should be checked against current call documentation rather than assumed.

What is the difference between CroRIS and CERIF?

CERIF is the data-modeling standard (maintained by euroCRIS) that defines how entities like people, projects, and outputs should be structured for interoperability across research information systems. CroRIS is an actual national CRIS implementation — a real, operating system for Croatia — built with entity modules aligned to that kind of standard, not the standard itself.

CroRIS: Croatia’s National Research Information System (and Successor to Standalone CROSBI)