IMIST (Morocco): National Scientific and Technical Information Institute

IMIST — the Institut Marocain de l’Information Scientifique et Technique — is Morocco’s national scientific and technical information institute. It operates as a unit of CNRST (Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique et Technique), the country’s national scientific and technical research body, and its role is distinct from CNRST’s funding programmes: where CNRST funds research through doctoral scholarships and priority-area grants, IMIST builds and operates the shared digital infrastructure Moroccan researchers and institutions use to publish, register, and discover research output. For a research-information professional outside Morocco, IMIST is the closest single point of comparison to a national CRIS-adjacent information service — closer in shape to India’s VIDWAN researcher database or a national repository/journal-hosting consortium than to a funding agency.

What IMIST actually is, and what it is not

IMIST is a research-support institute, not a funder and not a university. Its own site (imist.ma) identifies it in its footer as “IMIST-CNRST,” and CNRST’s institutional description (corroborated independently via the French Wikipedia entry for CNRST, which lists “l’Institut marocain de l’information scientifique et technique (IMIST)” among its notable constituent structures) places it as one of CNRST’s specialized units for scientific and technical information (IST). CNRST itself sits under Morocco’s Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Innovation.

What we could not verify directly: CNRST’s own site (cnrst.ma) returned a TLS certificate error on every fetch attempt during research for this page (both plain and browser-UA requests), so the organizational relationship above is confirmed from IMIST’s own site plus an independent secondary source rather than a direct read of CNRST’s institutional page. If you need the current authoritative org chart, verify against cnrst.ma directly once its certificate issue is resolved.

IMIST’s core services

These are the services IMIST’s own site (imist.ma, fetched directly and currently reachable — no archived mirror was needed) documents. Each is a distinct platform or function, not a single “portal”:

Toubk@l — the national thesis and dissertation catalog

Toubkal is described on IMIST’s own product page as “le catalogue national des thèses et mémoires” — the national catalog of theses and dissertations, built through cooperation between Moroccan researchers, national higher-education institutions, and IMIST, as part of the government’s research-development policy. It functions as Morocco’s central discovery point for completed graduate research output. We could not confirm a current record count from IMIST’s own page — a search-engine summary cited approximate figures for thesis holdings, but IMIST’s page itself does not state a number, so no figure is asserted here.

Otrohati — the catalog of theses in preparation

Otrohati is IMIST’s companion registration platform for theses in progress at Moroccan universities, rather than completed ones. Together, Toubkal and Otrohati cover both ends of the thesis lifecycle: what has been registered as underway, and what has been completed and deposited.

PRSM — Portail des Revues Scientifiques Marocaines

PRSM (the Moroccan Scientific Journals Portal) is IMIST’s journal-hosting platform — described on IMIST’s own project pages as the country’s first national electronic-publishing platform for scholarly journals. It offers two distinct services to Moroccan journals: development and hosting of natively electronic journals, and conversion of existing print journals into electronic format with hosting of the resulting electronic version on IMIST’s own servers. A “Version 2” of PRSM has been in development as an optimization of the portal originally launched in 2012 — treat any specific journal count as needing a fresh check, since portal-managed journal counts change as titles are onboarded.

Researcher and skills database

IMIST maintains a database of Moroccan researcher profiles/skills, in the same functional space as India’s VIDWAN — a national directory intended to make researcher expertise discoverable — though we could not verify from IMIST’s own site whether it exposes structured, machine-readable profiles (ORCID-style) or is primarily a searchable directory; treat that distinction as unconfirmed rather than assuming CRIS-grade interoperability.

Access to international electronic resources

IMIST brokers institutional/national access to full-text and bibliographic databases for the Moroccan research community, including full-text platforms (Cairn, Springer, ScienceDirect, JSTOR, LexisMA) and bibliographic/citation databases (Scopus, Web of Science, MathSciNet), with EZproxy-based remote-access credentials issued through researchers’ home institutions, plus its own library catalog (OPAC).

Scholarly-support services

IMIST’s site also lists plagiarism-detection support (iThenticate), a DOI assignment service for Moroccan publications, and periodic webinars run jointly with major publishers and indexing services (Elsevier, LexisNexis, Clarivate, Cairn) — functions that, taken together, put IMIST in the position of national intermediary between Moroccan research output and the international scholarly-publishing/indexing ecosystem, rather than a passive access broker.

Why this matters for research-information interoperability

For anyone mapping national research-information infrastructure — the audience this page is written for — IMIST is a useful case of a single national body combining three functions that many countries split across separate agencies: a repository function (Toubkal), a journal-hosting/publishing-platform function (PRSM), and a researcher-directory function, under one institute rather than one per function. That consolidation is CNRST’s own structural choice, not a CASRAI Dictionary category — but it is directly relevant if you are cross-walking national CRIS/RIM landscapes, since it means a single point of contact (IMIST) rather than three separate national bodies covers what, in many other national systems, are three distinct pieces of infrastructure.

IMIST is not itself a CRIS in the current-research-information-system sense (it has no confirmed public claim to CERIF-based research-information modeling); it is closer to a bundled national repository-plus-publishing-plus-directory service. If you are looking for the CRIS/RIM data-model concept itself, see the CRIS & identifiers pillar.

Frequently asked questions

Is IMIST the same organization as CNRST?

No. CNRST (Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique et Technique) is Morocco’s national scientific and technical research body and IMIST’s parent organization; IMIST is one of CNRST’s specialized units, focused specifically on scientific and technical information services rather than research funding. CNRST’s funding programmes (PBER doctoral scholarships, PPR priority-research grants) are covered separately — see the CNRST funding overview.

What is Toubkal used for?

Toubkal is Morocco’s national catalog of completed theses and dissertations, built by IMIST in cooperation with Moroccan universities and professional training institutions, so a thesis deposited at one Moroccan institution is discoverable nationally rather than only through that institution’s own library.

What is PRSM?

PRSM (Portail des Revues Scientifiques Marocaines) is IMIST’s national electronic-journal-hosting platform, offering both native electronic-journal hosting and conversion/hosting of previously print-only Moroccan scholarly journals.

Does IMIST provide document delivery?

IMIST’s own site documents remote access to subscribed full-text databases and a library catalog (OPAC), which functions as its access-to-literature service; we did not find a distinct, separately named “document delivery” service (in the classic interlibrary-loan sense) on IMIST’s own site, so that specific service is not asserted here beyond the database-access function described above.

Does IMIST provide bibliometric support?

IMIST provides access to the major citation databases used for bibliometric work (Scopus, Web of Science) and lists webinars with indexing/analytics providers (Clarivate). We could not verify from IMIST’s own site whether it operates a dedicated bibliometric-analysis or research-assessment service beyond that database access, so no such service is asserted here.

Sources and verification notes

• IMIST’s own site, imist.ma, fetched directly (live, HTTP-reachable at time of writing — no archived mirror needed) for its services list and Toubkal product page.
• CNRST’s own site, cnrst.ma, was not reachable during research — every fetch attempt (plain and browser-UA) returned a TLS certificate error. The organizational relationship stated above rests on IMIST’s own self-identification (“IMIST-CNRST”) plus independent corroboration from the French Wikipedia article on CNRST, not a direct read of cnrst.ma.
• Specific figures we could not verify from a primary source — thesis record counts on Toubkal, current journal counts on PRSM, and whether the researcher database exposes machine-readable profiles — are explicitly flagged as unverified above rather than asserted.