CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: institutional repository

  • ORCID Registry vs Institutional Repository

    Researcher metadata should live in both systems, but for different reasons: the ORCID registry holds the person-owned identity record a researcher carries between institutions, while the institutional repository or CRIS holds the institution-owned record used for reporting, compliance, and assessment. The two should be kept aligned through automated API feeds, not parallel manual entry.

    The ORCID registry is a global, non-proprietary database of persistent digital identifiers — ORCID iDs — that let a researcher maintain one authoritative, portable record of their affiliations, works, and funding across every system they touch. That single design fact is what determines the division of labour with institutional systems, and it is the source of most of the “where does this data actually live” confusion research offices report.

    What is the ORCID registry, and what is it for?

    The ORCID registry launched in October 2012 as a non-profit, member-supported alternative to the proprietary author-ID systems then run by individual publishers and databases. Its governing principle, stated in ORCID’s own registry documentation, is that individuals own their record: researchers — not institutions or publishers — control what is displayed publicly, what is shared with “trusted organisations,” and who those organisations are.

    This person-centric design means the registry is built to follow a researcher across employers, disciplines, and countries. It is not built to answer institution-level questions such as “which outputs count toward our next research assessment” — that is a different data model entirely, owned by a different actor.

    What do institutional repositories and CRIS platforms manage instead?

    Institutional repositories and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) — platforms such as Pure, Symplectic Elements, and DSpace-CRIS — exist to serve the institution’s reporting, compliance, and visibility needs, not the researcher’s portable identity. They aggregate outputs, grants, and staff affiliations at the organisational level, typically structured around the CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) data model maintained by euroCRIS.

    This is also where regulatory deadlines bite. Under the UK’s Research Excellence Framework open-access policy, outputs must be deposited in an institutional repository within three months of acceptance to remain eligible for the next assessment exercise — a requirement that will continue to apply under REF 2029. That obligation sits squarely with the institution, not with ORCID.

    Where should each type of researcher metadata actually live?

    In practice, the split is not “ORCID or CRIS” but “which record is authoritative for which fact.” The table below sets out the practical division of labour that most research offices converge on once duplicate entry becomes painful enough to fix.

    Metadata type Authoritative home Why
    Person identity, career history, cross-institution works list ORCID registry Researcher-owned, portable, survives institutional moves
    REF/assessment-eligible outputs, funder compliance records Institutional CRIS/repository Institution is legally accountable for reporting accuracy
    Grant and funder affiliation data Both, synchronised Funders (e.g. UKRI) require an ORCID iD at application, then institutions track spend internally
    Public-facing researcher profile ORCID registry (primary), CRIS-fed institutional page (secondary) One canonical identity, many display surfaces

    UKRI has required an ORCID iD from principal and co-investigators applying for funding across its research councils since 2023, which makes the registry the practical entry point for grant-related identity data even though the institution remains the system of record for compliance reporting.

    How do auto-update feeds eliminate duplicate data entry?

    Manual double-entry — typing the same publication into a CRIS and then again into an ORCID record — is the single biggest source of researcher frustration with metadata systems, and it is entirely avoidable. ORCID’s own registry documentation is explicit about the goal: reduce the burden on researchers and improve how information is shared, rather than asking them to re-key it.

    The mechanism is ORCID’s Member API, which — unlike the read-only Public API — allows an authenticated institutional system to write updates directly to a researcher’s record with their permission. A properly configured integration works in both directions:

    • CRIS-to-ORCID push: when a researcher deposits a new output in the institutional repository, the system automatically writes it to their ORCID record, tagged with the institution as the data source.
    • ORCID-to-CRIS pull: when a researcher joins an institution, the CRIS uses ORCID’s “search-and-link” workflow to pull their existing works and affiliation history into the local profile without re-typing.
    • Provenance tagging: every item on an ORCID record carries a visible source tag, so a reviewer can see whether an entry came from the researcher, an institution, a publisher, or a funder.

    Platforms such as DSpace-CRIS offer this bidirectional synchronisation as a built-in feature rather than a custom build, and ORCID’s “trusted organisation” permission model means the researcher grants and can revoke that write access at any time — the delegation is explicit, not implicit.

    Common questions about the ORCID registry

    What is an ORCID registry?

    An ORCID registry is the central, non-proprietary database that issues and stores ORCID iDs — persistent digital identifiers that disambiguate individual researchers and link them to their affiliations, works, and funding records. It is maintained by ORCID, a member-supported non-profit, and researchers register and control it directly rather than an institution or publisher owning the record.

    Can I look up someone’s ORCID?

    Yes. The public search function on the ORCID registry lets anyone look up a researcher’s public profile by name, affiliation, or ORCID iD, subject to whatever privacy settings that individual has chosen. Fields marked private by the record holder will not appear in public search results, even though the underlying record still exists.

    Who can register for ORCID?

    Anyone engaged in research, scholarship, or innovation can register for an ORCID iD directly and free of charge, regardless of career stage, discipline, institution, or country. This open registration model is what allows the identifier to persist across job changes, unlike institution-issued staff or repository IDs that expire when someone leaves.

    Does ORCID cost money?

    Registering for and using an ORCID iD is always free for individual researchers. Costs only arise for organisations: institutions, publishers, and funders that want Member API write access — the level needed for auto-update integrations with a CRIS or repository — pay ORCID membership dues, while read-only lookups via the Public API remain free.

    Implications for research offices and publishers

    For research administrators, the practical takeaway is not to choose between the ORCID registry and the CRIS but to stop treating them as separate data-entry destinations. Institutions that configure bidirectional API sync report far fewer profile-accuracy complaints from academic staff, because researchers enter a change once and it propagates outward.

    For publishers and funders, the same logic applies to contributor metadata: ORCID records can carry CRediT contributor-role tags alongside a work, so a journal’s manuscript system, the author’s ORCID record, and the institution’s CRIS can all reference the same role assignment rather than three independent descriptions of who did what.

    Outlook: toward a single source of truth

    The direction of travel across research information management is unambiguous: person-level identity consolidates in the ORCID registry, institution-level reporting consolidates in the CRIS, and the connective tissue between them is API-driven synchronisation rather than parallel manual records. As funders such as UKRI extend ORCID requirements further into the grant lifecycle, institutions that have not yet automated their CRIS-to-ORCID feeds will face growing duplicate-entry costs relative to those that have.

    Research offices evaluating a CRIS or repository upgrade should treat native, bidirectional ORCID Member API support as a baseline procurement requirement, not an optional add-on — the alternative is asking researchers to keep doing by hand what the API was built to automate.

  • Scholarly Communication Librarian: Remit & KPIs

    A scholarly communication librarian is the institutional specialist who manages an organisation’s research-dissemination lifecycle — open access compliance, institutional repository content, author rights and copyright advice, and research-impact metrics — usually from within, or alongside, the university library. For research administrators scoping this function for the first time, the practical questions are rarely about the job title itself but about remit, reporting line, and how success is measured.

    Scholarly communication is defined by the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) as “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use” — a definition first published in ACRL’s 2003 white paper Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication and still the field’s standard reference point.

    What does a scholarly communication librarian actually do?

    A scholarly communication librarian coordinates four practical work streams: institutional repository management, publishing services, copyright and author-rights advice, and research-impact assessment. The NASIG Core Competencies for Scholarly Communication Librarians, adopted in 2017 and revised in 2020, describes the role’s duties as “broad and amorphous” by design — a single post-holder rarely owns every strand, and responsibility is often diffused across a wider library team.

    In day-to-day terms, that means: encouraging and processing repository deposits, checking publisher self-archiving and embargo terms, advising authors on publication agreements and Creative Commons licensing, running open access and OER outreach (often timed around International Open Access Week), and helping researchers interpret citation and altmetrics data for tenure, promotion, or funder reporting.

    What is the remit of an institutional office of scholarly communication?

    An office of scholarly communication is the organisational unit — typically nested inside the university library — that holds institution-wide responsibility for these duties rather than leaving them to individual subject librarians. Its remit generally spans five areas: institutional repository management, publishing services, copyright services, research data management, and assessment/impact metrics, as set out in the joint COAR/OCLC Librarians’ Competencies Profile for Scholarly Communication and Open Access (Calarco et al., 2016).

    Institutions vary in how much of this remit sits in one office versus being distributed. The University of Edinburgh’s Scholarly Communications Team is a working example of a centralised model: it “supports University staff and students before, during and after publication of their research,” managing policy compliance, the institutional repository (ERA), and the research information system (PURE) as a single service point.

    Who does a scholarly communication librarian report to?

    There is no single reporting model across the sector. Four structures recur most often in job postings and organisational charts, and the choice usually reflects whether an institution treats scholarly communication as a collections function, a research-support function, or a technology function.

    Reporting model Typical manager Institutional emphasis
    Collections-integrated Associate University Librarian for Collections & Scholarly Communication Ties open access and repository work to acquisitions and collection strategy
    Research-services-integrated Associate University Librarian for Research Services / Academic Success Positions the role alongside research support, data management, grants
    Digital-scholarship unit Head of Digital Scholarship Groups scholarly communication with data curation and digital publishing
    Distributed/diffuse No single line manager; shared across subject librarians Spreads responsibility rather than centralising it in one post

    For research administrators building a business case, the reporting line matters because it determines which budget line funds the post, which committee sets its priorities, and whether the role has authority to negotiate publisher agreements directly or must route decisions through acquisitions or general counsel.

    What competencies and skills does the role require?

    NASIG’s framework groups core competencies into four cross-cutting themes — background knowledge, technical skills, outreach and instruction, and team building — layered under whichever of the five areas of emphasis a given post prioritises. Practical requirements include:

    • Working knowledge of copyright law, fair use/fair dealing, and publisher self-archiving policies
    • Familiarity with repository platforms (e.g. DSpace, Digital Commons, Fedora) and identifier systems such as CrossRef and DataCite DOIs and ORCID
    • Ability to interpret bibliometrics and altmetrics without overstating what a single indicator (such as the Journal Impact Factor) can support
    • Project management skills to run cross-departmental initiatives with subject librarians, university counsel, and IT
    • Comfort advising on funder open access mandates and institutional policy drafting

    Author-identifier and contribution-tracking literacy increasingly falls within this remit too. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and scholarly communication librarians are frequently the staff who explain CRediT tagging to authors submitting to journals that require it.

    What KPIs do institutions use to measure the role?

    Because the remit spans compliance, service, and advocacy work, institutions typically track a mixed basket of KPIs rather than a single output metric:

    • Compliance KPIs: proportion of eligible outputs deposited in the repository within funder-mandated windows (for UK institutions, this maps to REF open access requirements and UKRI’s policy, in force for journal articles and conference proceedings since 1 April 2022 and extended to monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 1 January 2024)
    • Service KPIs: turnaround time on copyright and publishing-agreement queries; number of consultations delivered
    • Adoption KPIs: repository deposit volume and growth; OER adoption rate and associated student cost savings
    • Outreach KPIs: workshop and training attendance; policy and guidance page usage
    • Impact-reporting KPIs: volume of impact-metrics consultations supporting tenure, promotion, or funder reporting cycles

    Compliance and adoption KPIs are the ones most directly reportable to institutional leadership and funders, since they map to external mandates rather than internal service-level judgement calls.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What does a scholarly communication librarian do?

    A scholarly communication librarian manages an institution’s research dissemination lifecycle: encouraging and processing institutional repository deposits, advising authors on copyright and publisher agreements, supporting open access compliance, and helping researchers interpret citation and altmetrics data for promotion or funder reporting purposes.

    Who does a scholarly communication librarian report to?

    Reporting lines vary by institution. Most commonly the role sits under an Associate University Librarian for Collections, Research Services, or Digital Scholarship, though some institutions run a distributed model where duties are shared across subject librarians rather than assigned to one dedicated post.

    Not exactly. Copyright services are one of five recognised areas of emphasis within scholarly communication work, alongside repository management, publishing services, data management, and impact assessment — a copyright librarian is typically a specialist within, not synonymous with, the broader role.

    What skills does a scholarly communication librarian need?

    Core requirements include copyright and licensing knowledge, familiarity with repository platforms and identifier systems (DOIs, ORCID), bibliometrics literacy, project management ability, and comfort translating funder open access mandates into institutional policy and researcher-facing guidance.

    Implications for research administrators building the team

    Institutions standing up this function from scratch should decide the reporting line before writing the job description, since the five areas of emphasis rarely fit into one full-time post. A common pattern is to hire a generalist scholarly communication librarian first, then add copyright or data-management specialists as the repository, compliance, and outreach workload grows. Aligning KPIs to funder mandates — UKRI open access policy, REF-linked deposit windows — gives the post measurable, leadership-visible outcomes from year one rather than only qualitative service-desk activity.

    As funder identifier requirements expand and CRediT-style contribution tagging becomes more common in submission systems, institutions that fold author-identifier and contribution-metadata literacy into this role early will spend less time retrofitting compliance processes later. Research administrators building or reviewing this function should treat it as a standing institutional capability, not a project team, and revisit its remit and KPIs whenever a major funder policy changes.

  • Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies: A ROARMAP Guide for Research Administrators

    When a research office needs to check whether a funder requires immediate deposit or permits a twelve-month embargo, guesswork is not good enough. The registry of open access repository mandates and policies — known by its acronym ROARMAP — exists precisely to remove that guesswork. Maintained by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, it is a searchable, international catalogue of the open access mandates that universities, research institutions and funders have adopted, and it remains one of the few places where those policies can be compared side by side rather than tracked down one funder website at a time.

    This matters more in 2026 than it did a decade ago. Funder mandates have multiplied, cOAlition S members continue to refine Plan S implementation, and — as a June 2026 German constitutional ruling shows — even settled mandates can be challenged in court. Research administrators, library staff and compliance officers need a single reference point that tracks all of it. ROARMAP is that reference point.

    What ROARMAP catalogues, and why it matters

    ROARMAP began life in 2003 as the Institutional Archives Registry, built by the EPrints team at the University of Southampton. It was renamed the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies in 2006, then adjusted again, settling on its current name — Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies — around 2014. Throughout those renamings, its purpose stayed constant: track every publicly documented policy that requires or encourages researchers to make peer-reviewed outputs openly accessible, usually by depositing a copy in a repository.

    ROARMAP has a companion registry, ROAR (the Registry of Open Access Repositories), which indexes the repositories themselves rather than the policies that govern them. The distinction trips people up regularly, so it is worth setting out clearly alongside a third commonly confused resource, OpenDOAR.

    Registry What it indexes Typical use case
    ROARMAP Open access mandates and policies from institutions and funders Checking what a funder or institution requires
    ROAR Open access repositories themselves — location, size, growth Finding where a repository is hosted
    OpenDOAR Curated, vetted directory of repositories and their technical metadata Selecting a compliant repository to deposit into

    Entries in ROARMAP are not uniform in strength. Some record a simple recommendation to self-archive; others are mandatory policies where compliance is tied to continued grant funding — the sanction that gives a mandate real teeth. As of the last widely cited published count, ROARMAP had catalogued policies from more than 520 universities and over 75 research funders worldwide, a figure that has continued to grow as more institutions formalise their open access requirements.

    How cOAlition S members’ policies are catalogued

    cOAlition S is the group of research funders — including national funders, charitable foundations and the European Commission — that came together in 2018 to implement Plan S, the requirement that publicly funded research be made immediately open access without embargo. Because cOAlition S members are funders rather than repository operators, their individual mandates are exactly the kind of entry ROARMAP was built to hold.

    Each cOAlition S member’s policy is entered as a discrete record, so an administrator can look up, for example, what a specific national research council requires on licensing (typically CC BY), acceptable routes to compliance (Gold, Green with a zero-embargo repository deposit, or a transformative agreement), and how the policy interacts with the funder’s own compliance-monitoring tools, such as the Journal Checker Tool. Because ROARMAP predates Plan S by more than a decade, it also preserves the pre-2018 policy text for many of these funders, which is useful when institutions need to establish exactly when a requirement changed.

    This is a genuine information gain over simply reading each funder’s website individually: ROARMAP lets an administrator filter by funder type, country and adoption date, surfacing patterns — such as clusters of European funders tightening embargo terms in the same policy cycle — that are invisible from any single funder’s own page.

    Using the registry to compare institutional and funder mandates

    For day-to-day compliance work, ROARMAP is used less as a browsing tool and more as a lookup and benchmarking tool. A typical workflow for a research administrator looks like this:

    • Search by country or institution name to confirm whether a specific university has a formal mandate, and since when.
    • Filter by policymaker type — funder versus institution — to separate overlapping obligations on a single researcher.
    • Check the deposit timing and permitted embargo period recorded against each policy.
    • Note the required manuscript version — preprint, accepted manuscript or version of record.
    • Compare licensing requirements (commonly CC BY) where the policy specifies one.
    • Benchmark a draft institutional policy against comparable peer institutions before it goes to committee.

    This benchmarking use case is one of ROARMAP’s most practical applications. Rather than drafting an institutional open access policy from a blank page, a policy officer can pull several comparable universities’ mandates from the registry, line up their deposit windows and enforcement mechanisms, and use that comparison to justify the strength of a proposed new policy to institutional leadership.

    What is an open access repository?

    An open access repository is a freely accessible digital archive where researchers self-archive peer-reviewed articles, preprints or accepted manuscripts so readers can access them without a paywall. Universities run institutional repositories; funders and disciplines run subject-based ones. ROARMAP catalogues the policies requiring deposit — not the repositories themselves.

    How does OpenDOAR differ from ROARMAP?

    OpenDOAR is a curated directory listing vetted open access repositories and their technical characteristics, while ROARMAP lists the mandates and policies that require deposit into those repositories. Administrators typically use OpenDOAR to identify a compliant repository, then check ROARMAP to confirm whether deposit is compulsory and on what terms.

    What is self-archiving, and how do ROARMAP-listed policies define it?

    Self-archiving — the “Green” route to open access — means an author deposits a manuscript into a repository alongside, or instead of, publishing openly with a journal. Policies catalogued in ROARMAP typically specify the deposit timing, permitted embargo length, and which manuscript version satisfies the mandate.

    What are the drawbacks of relying on open access mandates?

    Mandates catalogued in registries such as ROARMAP vary widely in enforcement: some merely encourage deposit while others tie compliance to grant payment. Weak or unmonitored policies show low actual deposit rates, embargo terms conflict across funders, and legal challenges — as seen in Germany in 2026 — can unsettle even long-established mandates.

    What the changing legal landscape means for research administrators

    ROARMAP’s value is not static, and 2026 has already supplied a reminder of why. In June, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court struck down a state-level bylaw at the University of Konstanz that would have compelled researchers to exercise their statutory secondary-publication right — ruling that regulating copyright through employment or institutional statute conflicted with the federal government’s exclusive legislative competence over copyright law. The University of Konstanz noted afterwards that the ruling changed little in practice, because the great majority of its researchers already deposit voluntarily. But the case is a useful illustration for administrators elsewhere: a mandate’s formal status, its legal basis and its actual compliance rate can diverge, and a registry entry captures only the first of those three.

    That gap between formal mandate and practical uptake is exactly why registries such as ROARMAP function as compliance infrastructure rather than mere reference material. Institutions revising their own open access policy — whether to align with cOAlition S requirements, respond to a national research assessment exercise, or pre-empt a legal challenge — need a documented, dated record of what comparable institutions and funders actually require, not an assumption based on the last policy a colleague happened to read. For a wider view of how these obligations sit alongside contributorship and compliance frameworks more broadly, CASRAI’s research administration resources and dictionary of research terms provide further grounding.

    As funder policies continue to tighten and jurisdictions test the legal limits of mandated deposit, expect ROARMAP’s role to shift from a static archive towards a living reference that research offices consult routinely, alongside compliance checkers and repository directories, whenever a grant agreement, tenure case or institutional policy review depends on knowing exactly what an open access mandate actually requires.