The 17th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (CRIS2026) took place May 19-22, 2026, at the University of the Azores’ São Miguel Campus in Ponta Delgada, Portugal. Organised by euroCRIS in cooperation with PTCRIS, Portugal’s national CRIS infrastructure developed by FCCN, the event drew 112 of 121 registered participants across 20 sessions, with six sponsor organisations. For CASRAI’s audience of CRIS managers and research-information professionals, the conference is a useful annual checkpoint on where the field’s shared standards and interoperability work actually stand.
What the CRIS Conference is, and euroCRIS’s role
euroCRIS is the international not-for-profit membership association that holds custodianship of CERIF, the Common European Research Information Format, and coordinates community infrastructure for interoperability among Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) — institutional and national systems (Pure, VIVO, DSpace-CRIS, and country-specific platforms like PTCRIS) that track researchers, projects, outputs, and funding. The biennial CRIS Conference is euroCRIS’s flagship event: a gathering of CRIS managers, research-information system developers, research-office staff, and infrastructure builders to present peer-reviewed papers, posters, and practitioner talks on the state of the field. See CASRAI’s dictionary entry on euroCRIS and the persistent identifiers and research information systems pillar for how these pieces fit together.
CRIS2026: dates, location, and themes
CRIS2026 was held at the University of the Azores, an EU outermost-region host chosen to bring the conference to a smaller, geographically distinct research community. The programme’s stated focus areas, per euroCRIS’s own conference announcements, spanned open science, open infrastructure, interoperability, artificial intelligence, open source, and research evaluation — themes that track closely with where CRIS/RIM (research information management) practice has been moving over the past several conference cycles: less about record-keeping for its own sake, more about how a CRIS functions as connective infrastructure across a research organisation’s reporting, assessment, and open-science obligations.
Attendance, sessions, and award winners
euroCRIS and its Portuguese co-host FCCN reported 112 of 121 registered participants in attendance, across 20 conference sessions with six sponsor organisations. Two awards were presented at the closing session. The Keith Jeffery Award for best paper — named for euroCRIS’s late Honorary President Keith Jeffery, a long-serving figure in CERIF’s development — went to Ils de Bal and Pascale Dengis of the Flemish Government’s WEWIS department, for a paper on the advantages and challenges of aggregating data into a regional CRIS, using Flanders’ FRIS system as the case. The best-poster award, voted on by attendees, went to Audrey Peek for a poster on the Kosovo Research Information System (KRIS).
Why this matters for CRIS managers and research-information teams
A single conference recap is not, by itself, a standards change — nothing at CRIS2026 alters CERIF, ORCID, or any other identifier standard CASRAI documents. What the conference does signal is direction of travel. The award-winning work on regional CRIS aggregation (Flanders’ FRIS) and on standing up a national CRIS from a smaller resource base (Kosovo’s KRIS) both speak to a practical problem research-administration teams outside the largest research-intensive institutions face: interoperability and shared infrastructure matter more, not less, as more national and regional systems come online and need to exchange data with each other and with pan-European aggregators like OpenAIRE. That is the same interoperability problem CASRAI covers in its guide to the CERIF-Pure-VIVO triangle and its dictionary entry on CRIS interoperability.
For institutions evaluating or operating a CRIS, conference proceedings like CRIS2026’s are also a lower-friction way to track vendor-neutral practitioner consensus than following any single vendor’s roadmap. euroCRIS typically makes CRIS Conference papers and extended abstracts available through its open-access repository after the event, which is a useful source for research-office staff doing CRIS procurement or migration work — see CASRAI’s CRIS vs institutional repository vs RIMS comparison for the underlying distinctions those papers assume.
Where to follow up
euroCRIS publishes conference news, the call-for-proposals archive, and post-conference materials (including the paper and poster proceedings) on its own site, eurocris.org. Its biennial cadence means the next full CRIS Conference falls in 2028, with euroCRIS’s regular membership meetings and working-group activity continuing in the interim.
