POL-on (short for the Polish “Zintegrowany System Informacji o Nauce i Szkolnictwie Wyższym,” or Integrated System of Information on Science and Higher Education) is Poland’s central, government-mandated database of the country’s higher-education and research sector. It is not a single application but the flagship system in a wider family of linked registries — collectively the “POL-on Network” — that together cover institutions, staff, students, degrees, funded projects, and scholarly output.
For research administrators working with Polish universities, research institutes, or funding bodies, POL-on is the system of record: it is where a Polish higher-education institution (HEI) or scientific institution is legally required to report the data that Poland’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education later uses for institutional evaluation, budget allocation, and national statistics.
What POL-on is, and what it isn’t
POL-on is best understood as Poland’s national current research information system (CRIS) infrastructure, in the same functional category as Norway’s NVA (formerly Cristin), Portugal’s CiênciaVitae, or Turkey’s TR Dizin — a government-run, mandatory registry rather than an institution-level research information management platform such as Pure or an international discovery layer. It does not replace institutional CRIS deployments; Polish universities that run their own Pure, DSpace, or custom research-information system still have a separate legal obligation to feed a defined subset of that data into POL-on in the format the Ministry specifies.
The system is operated on the Ministry’s behalf by the National Information Processing Institute (Ośrodek Przetwarzania Informacji – Państwowy Instytut Badawczy, OPI PIB), which builds and maintains POL-on and the other systems in the POL-on Network. Reporting into POL-on is a statutory obligation under Poland’s Law on Higher Education and Science (the 2018 reform commonly referred to as “Ustawa 2.0”), not a voluntary or opt-in registry — this is the key distinction from many other national researcher-database systems, several of which (e.g. India’s VIDWAN or Brazil’s Lattes) are populated on a more voluntary, researcher-driven basis.
Governance: the Ministry of Science and Higher Education
POL-on sits under Poland’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education (Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego, MNiSW) — the ministry re-established as an independent portfolio in early 2024 after a period as part of a combined Ministry of Education and Science. The Ministry uses POL-on data for exactly the purposes a national administrative registry is built for: coordinating public spending on science and higher education, budget planning, and producing the statistics that feed Poland’s periodic institutional research evaluation exercise.
Beyond the Ministry itself, POL-on data is drawn on by other Polish public bodies with a stake in the higher-education and research sector, including Statistics Poland (Główny Urząd Statystyczny, GUS), the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR), the National Science Centre (NCN — see CASRAI’s NCN funding guide), and the body responsible for academic degree conferral. This multi-agency reliance is exactly why the reporting obligation is legally binding rather than advisory: POL-on functions as shared public infrastructure, not a single agency’s internal tool.
What data POL-on aggregates
Reporting institutions — publicly and non-publicly funded universities, research institutes, the Polish Academy of Sciences institutes, and other scientific entities recognized under the 2018 law — are obliged to submit data across several categories:
- Institutions — the legal and organizational profile of each higher-education and scientific entity, including its disciplinary scope and evaluation category.
- Academic and research staff — employment records, academic degrees held, and disciplinary affiliation, used among other things to calculate an institution’s eligible headcount for evaluation purposes.
- Students and doctoral candidates — enrollment, programs, and (via the linked ELA system, described below) post-graduation labor-market outcomes.
- Degrees and academic titles — conferred degrees, habilitations, and professorial titles.
- Scholarly publications — not held directly in POL-on itself but in PBN (Polska Bibliografia Naukowa / Polish Scholarly Bibliography), the linked bibliographic registry described below, which is the actual publication-level data source feeding institutional evaluation.
Some of this data is published as open public data on the POL-on portal (institutional profiles and aggregate statistics, for example); other categories — personal staff and student records in particular — are restricted to authorized institutional and Ministry users under Poland’s data-protection rules, consistent with GDPR.
The POL-on Network: related systems
“POL-on” is often used loosely to mean the whole family of linked systems OPI PIB operates. The main components a research administrator is likely to encounter include:
- PBN (Polska Bibliografia Naukowa / Polish Scholarly Bibliography) — the national bibliographic database of publications by Polish researchers and of Polish and international academic journals; this is the publication-level counterpart to POL-on’s institutional and personnel data, and the source used in Poland’s institutional evaluation exercise.
- ORPPD (Ogólnopolskie Repozytorium Prac Dyplomowych) — the nationwide repository of diploma theses and dissertations, used primarily for anti-plagiarism screening across institutions.
- OSF (Zintegrowany System Usług dla Nauki) — the integrated system of services for science, supporting electronic grant application and project-monitoring workflows across several Polish funding streams.
- ELA — the graduate-tracking system, which links POL-on enrollment and completion data to Social Insurance Institution (ZUS) employment records to report graduate labor-market outcomes by institution and field of study.
Understanding that POL-on itself is the institutional/personnel/degree registry, while PBN is the separate publication registry, matters in practice — a request to “check an institution’s POL-on record” for evaluation purposes will often actually require cross-referencing both systems.
Role in national research evaluation and reporting
POL-on’s practical importance for research administrators comes from its role feeding Poland’s periodic comprehensive institutional evaluation of scientific activity, conducted at the level of individual scientific disciplines within each institution. Evaluation categories (on an A+ to C scale) determine, among other consequences, an institution’s eligibility to award doctoral and habilitation degrees in a given discipline and its share of core Ministry funding. Because POL-on and PBN data are the administrative record the Ministry draws on for this exercise, data quality and reporting timeliness in these systems has direct financial and accreditation consequences for an institution — not merely an administrative-compliance one.
This is the same structural pattern seen in other countries’ mandatory national CRIS registries used for research assessment — compare the role Italy’s IRIS/Cineca infrastructure or South Korea’s KRI play in their respective national evaluation frameworks (see CASRAI’s guides to IRIS (Cineca) and KCI/KRI) — though the specific evaluation methodology and legal basis are, of course, Poland-specific.
Access and public data
POL-on distinguishes between data made openly available and data restricted to authorized users. The public-facing POL-on portal publishes institutional-level information — profiles of universities and scientific institutions, aggregate statistics, and similar non-personal data — without requiring an account. Access to personal-level records (individual staff or student data) is restricted to authorized users at the reporting institution itself, the Ministry, and the other public bodies named above, reflecting the personal-data sensitivity of that layer of the system.
How POL-on fits into the wider identifier and CRIS landscape
POL-on is a national administrative registry, not a persistent-identifier system in the sense of ORCID or ROR, and it does not itself issue globally resolvable identifiers. In practice, Polish researchers and institutions typically hold both: a POL-on/PBN record for domestic reporting and evaluation purposes, and an ORCID iD or ROR ID for international interoperability, indexing, and cross-border research-information exchange. Some Polish institutional CRIS deployments map their local records to CERIF-based interchange formats promoted by euroCRIS to support that kind of cross-system exchange, though POL-on’s own reporting format is defined by Ministry regulation rather than by CERIF directly.
For institutions and researchers navigating multiple national research-information obligations at once — a common situation for cross-border collaborations involving Polish partners — the practical takeaway is that POL-on/PBN compliance and ORCID/ROR adoption are complementary, not substitutes for each other: one satisfies a Polish statutory reporting duty, the other supports international discoverability and identifier resolution.
Frequently asked questions
Is POL-on the same as PBN?
No. POL-on is the registry of institutions, staff, students, and degrees; PBN (Polska Bibliografia Naukowa) is the separate, linked registry of scholarly publications. Both are operated by OPI PIB and both feed into Poland’s institutional research evaluation, but they hold different categories of data.
Who is legally required to report to POL-on?
Publicly and non-publicly funded higher-education institutions, research institutes (including Polish Academy of Sciences institutes), and other scientific entities recognized under Poland’s 2018 Law on Higher Education and Science have a statutory obligation to supply data to POL-on.
Is POL-on data publicly accessible?
Institutional-level and aggregate data is published openly on the POL-on portal. Personal-level records for individual staff and students are restricted to the reporting institution, the Ministry, and other authorized public bodies, consistent with Polish data-protection law.
Does POL-on issue researcher identifiers like ORCID?
No. POL-on is an administrative reporting system, not a persistent-identifier registry. Polish researchers typically hold an ORCID iD separately for international identification, alongside their domestic POL-on/PBN record.
Which ministry oversees POL-on?
Poland’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education (Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego), re-established as an independent ministry in early 2024. OPI PIB (the National Information Processing Institute) builds and operates the system on the Ministry’s behalf.
