NARCIS, the Netherlands’ long-running national research portal, was decommissioned on 3 July 2023. Its immediate technical replacement was the Netherlands Research Portal, built on OpenAIRE infrastructure through a collaboration between UKB (the Dutch university libraries consortium), SURF, and OpenAIRE. But that portal swap is not the whole story, and conflating the two causes real confusion for anyone tracking Dutch research-information infrastructure. Running in parallel, and going considerably further, is SURF’s Open Research Information (ORI) program: a multi-year, sector-wide effort to bring order to the more than 70 institutional Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and repositories operating across Dutch research institutions without a unified governance structure. This guide separates the two threads, explains what changed and why, and covers what the ORI transition means for anyone integrating with, or reporting into, Dutch research-information systems.
What NARCIS was
NARCIS (National Academic Research and Collaboration Information System) launched in 2004 as a joint initiative of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Radboud University’s information centre, the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and the Association of Universities in the Netherlands. From 2011 it was operated by DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) from The Hague. Functionally, NARCIS worked as a national discovery layer: it harvested metadata about researchers, publications, datasets, and organizations from institutional repositories and CRIS systems across the country and exposed it through a single search portal, similar in spirit to what CRIS systems do at institutional scale, but aggregated nationally. In 2015 it switched researcher identification from the legacy Digital Author Identifier scheme to ORCID, an early sign of the broader interoperability direction the sector was already heading.
Why NARCIS was retired, and what replaced it
NARCIS was decommissioned on 3 July 2023. The stated rationale, reflected in coordinated announcements from SURF, OpenAIRE, and Dutch university libraries at the time, was that maintaining a bespoke national aggregation portal duplicated infrastructure that OpenAIRE already provided at European scale, and that Dutch metadata was better served by feeding into that shared infrastructure rather than a parallel national one. The Netherlands Research Portal (hosted at netherlands.openaire.eu) took over the discovery function: it aggregates the same category of metadata — publications, datasets, projects, organizations — from Dutch repositories and CRIS systems, but does so on OpenAIRE’s shared European infrastructure rather than a Netherlands-only codebase. For a researcher or research office, the practical takeaway is narrow but important: any institutional guidance, citation instructions, or system integration that still references narcis.nl is stale and should point to the Netherlands Research Portal, or directly to the OpenAIRE Research Graph, instead. The underlying source records were not lost — they still live in each institution’s own repository or CRIS — only the national aggregation layer changed hands.
CASRAI’s guide to DANS and Dutch research data archiving covers this same portal handover briefly, in the context of DANS’s own Data Stations and DMP support work. This guide picks up where that one leaves off: DANS’s role is data archiving and preservation; the portal transition and the ORI program described below are about research-information discovery and CRIS governance, a related but distinct layer of the same national ecosystem.
Open Research Information (ORI): the actual successor effort
It is a common but inaccurate simplification to describe SURF’s Open Research Information program as “what replaced NARCIS.” The Netherlands Research Portal replaced NARCIS’s specific discovery-portal function. ORI is a broader, separately scoped national program — approved in principle by the SURF Members’ Council in December 2023 and running under SURF’s Open Science innovation zone through 2030 — whose ambition, in SURF’s own framing, is that “all information about Dutch publicly funded research and its results are openly available and reusable.” Its stakeholders span the full Dutch research sector: UKB, the Association of Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), the Dutch universities of applied sciences (VH), NWO, the federation of university medical centres (NFU), SIA, ZonMw, KNAW, and CWTS.
ORI explicitly names the problem NARCIS’s retirement exposed rather than solved: more than 70 institutional CRIS and repository systems operate across Dutch research institutions without a unified governance structure, producing gaps in metadata quality, preservation practice, and cross-institutional visibility. Rather than rebuilding a single national portal, ORI’s approach is to work on the underlying infrastructure and governance layer that feeds any portal, national or European. Concretely, this includes:
- Alignment with the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, which SURF has signed, committing Dutch research institutions to make research information openly available through open infrastructures.
- MORIS (Modular Open Research Information System), a sector-wide system under development for recording practice-oriented research information.
- RAiD (Research Activity Identifier), a persistent identifier intended to uniquely identify research activities — a project-level PID distinct from a DOI (output-level) or ORCID (person-level), positioned to sit alongside the identifier types already covered in CASRAI’s persistent identifiers and research information systems coverage.
- Continued integration with OpenAIRE’s Scholarly Knowledge Graph and membership consortium, rather than a Netherlands-only aggregation layer.
What this means for CRIS interoperability, in practice
For institutions and international collaborators exchanging research metadata with Dutch partners, the practical implications of this transition follow directly from the governance gap ORI is trying to close:
- Don’t hard-code narcis.nl in any institutional link, citation guide, or automated harvest — it has been offline since July 2023. Point to the Netherlands Research Portal or query the OpenAIRE Research Graph API directly.
- Expect continued fragmentation, not sudden consolidation, in the near term. ORI is a multi-year program addressing 70-plus independently governed systems; it is a coordination and standards effort, not a single replacement platform arriving on a fixed date. Institution-level CRIS systems (built on platforms like Pure, Converis, or in-house systems, several of which already implement the CERIF data model promoted by euroCRIS) remain the actual systems of record; ORI works on the layer above them.
- Watch RAiD adoption specifically if project-level identifiers matter to your workflow — it is the concrete new PID coming out of this program, positioned to complement rather than replace existing DOI/ORCID/ROR usage.
- Treat “NARCIS” and “ORI” as sequential but not equivalent when writing institutional documentation: NARCIS was a specific, now-retired discovery portal; ORI is the current national program addressing the governance and interoperability problem that a single national portal was never designed to solve on its own.
Frequently asked questions
Is NARCIS still online?
No. NARCIS was decommissioned on 3 July 2023. Any link to narcis.nl should be updated to the Netherlands Research Portal (netherlands.openaire.eu) or to the OpenAIRE Research Graph directly.
Did the Open Research Information (ORI) program replace NARCIS?
Not directly. The Netherlands Research Portal, built on OpenAIRE by UKB, SURF, and OpenAIRE, is the direct functional replacement for NARCIS’s discovery-portal role. ORI is a separate, broader, longer-running SURF-led program addressing CRIS governance and open research information infrastructure across the whole Dutch research sector — a response to the same underlying fragmentation problem, but not a one-to-one portal swap.
What happened to the metadata that used to be in NARCIS?
It was not lost. NARCIS aggregated records that originated in institutional repositories and CRIS systems; those source systems continued operating and now feed the Netherlands Research Portal and OpenAIRE instead of NARCIS.
What is RAiD and how does it relate to this transition?
RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) is a persistent identifier for research activities/projects under development as part of the ORI program, intended for launch as the program matures. It sits alongside, not in place of, existing identifiers such as DOIs for outputs and ORCID for researchers.
Where can I find current, authoritative information on ORI?
SURF publishes program information directly on surf.nl under its Open Science themes; treat SURF’s own program pages as the primary source, since a multi-year program’s specific milestones and project list will continue to evolve.
