Research-information systems and integration

New agentic leaderboards score AI models on whether they actually finish real tasks, recover from errors, and avoid inventing tools — not on multiple-choice accuracy. For institutions weighing AI agents for literature review, data cleaning, or grant administration, that shift changes what reliable enough to deploy means, and exposes governance gaps in policies built around chatbot use rather than autonomous systems.

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft used a May 2026 Mars gravity-assist flyby to test its imager, magnetometer, and spectrometer, producing a time-lapse video and calibration data cross-checked against NASA, ESA, and UAE Mars missions ahead of its 2029 asteroid arrival.

All four LHC experiments — ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb — independently found signatures consistent with quark-gluon plasma in oxygen and neon collisions and reported it jointly, a rare instance of four separately governed, multi-thousand-author collaborations coordinating a shared result.

A Shanghai Astronomical Observatory-led team used dual-frequency Event Horizon Telescope data to produce the first spatially resolved map of how M87’s black hole glow changes near the event horizon.

OpenAlex’s January 2026 roadmap: the Walden rewrite to Databricks is done, Awards is now a first-class entity, and credit-based API pricing is rolling out.

As of Feb. 2026, OpenAlex requires an API key for all production API use and bills most calls on usage, with a daily free allowance per key.

ROR’s March 2026 recap of its Annual Community Meeting reports that nearly 20% of the 8,000+ organization records added in 2025 are in East Asia, and confirms ‘single search’ becomes ROR’s default affiliation-matching strategy in 2026. A separate, unrelated ROR post the same month marks the registry’s 7th anniversary with a POSI commitment update.

ARC’s 5-goal PID Action Plan — DOIs on grants, ROR on institutions, ORCID on personnel, plus a FAIR data policy — is due complete by end of 2026.

ORCID has published ORCID 2030: Advancing the Future of Research, its strategic plan for 2026-2029, built around five themes: empowering researchers, connecting research information, broadening its community, advancing trust and integrity, and strengthening its own resiliency. Here’s what the plan actually says and what it signals for research administrators.

Cornell University Library relaunched eCommons on DSpace-CRIS, hosted by 4Science on AWS, on May 18, 2026 — a real institutional CRIS-migration case study.

In June 2026, Cambia sold The Lens to a new Australian non-profit under SPIE. Here’s what changes, and what does not, for Lens.org researchers.

ResearchGate retired the opaque RG Score around 2022 for the Research Interest (RI) Score, a formula weighting citations, recommendations, and reads.

Denmark’s NORA research portal moved from DTU to Statistics Denmark in Jan. 2026, ahead of a reported consolidated, open-architecture database later in 2026.

ROR retired version 1 of its API and metadata schema in December 2025. Here is the actual timeline, what changed in schema v2, and what to check if your institution has any ROR-consuming integration.

Norway retired Cristin during 2025 in favor of NVA (Nasjonalt vitenarkiv, the Norwegian Research Information Repository), a single national system operated by Sikt that also absorbed 60-plus institutional repositories, including BORA. Here is what changed for researchers and administrators.

euroCRIS’s 17th CRIS Conference (CRIS2026) drew 112 attendees to the University of the Azores in May 2026, covering open science, interoperability, and AI. A recap of what happened and why it matters for CRIS managers.

Crossref has published its first position paper, arguing that national and international PID policy focused narrowly on identifiers misses what actually makes research infrastructure work: open linked metadata and sustainably governed organisations. The paper offers five recommendations for policymakers and draws worked examples from the UK, Portugal, Canada and South Africa.

ORCID and China’s CSTR Identification Platform signed an MOU on July 16, 2026 to pursue interoperability between their persistent identifier systems. No technical implementation details have been published yet; here’s what the agreement covers and why CRIS and research-administration teams working with Chinese research partners should watch it.

A preview of the v2026.3 CASRAI Dictionary release: scope, new terms, deprecations, and the schema-evolution work threading through the update.

CRIS systems are converging on interoperability but the three dominant data models still misalign. A practical guide to the CERIF-Pure-VIVO triangle.