Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A university running Pure as its CRIS, exposing a public 'research portal' and feeding the national REF submission.
- Is an instance
A research council running VIVO to publish a federated graph of its institute's researchers and projects.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
An institutional repository alone (DSpace, EPrints) is not a CRIS — it stores outputs but not the broader activity graph.
- Not an instance
A grants-management database alone is not a CRIS without the publications, people, and outputs layers.
- Not an instance
A single spreadsheet of publications is not a CRIS — it has no entity relationships, identifiers, or reporting layer.
Editorial commentary
A CRIS (Current Research Information System) is the system of record for an institution’s research activity. Typical CRIS functions include: ingesting publication data from Scopus, Web of Science, Crossref, and PubMed; harvesting from institutional repositories via OAI-PMH; receiving award notifications from funder systems; managing researcher CV pages; producing reports for national assessment exercises (REF, ERA, BRA, and similar); and exposing data through public researcher and unit portals. Commercial CRIS products include Pure (Elsevier), Elements (Symplectic, part of Digital Science), and Converis (Clarivate); open-source equivalents include VIVO and DSpace-CRIS.
What a CRIS is not
A CRIS is easy to confuse with adjacent systems it usually integrates with rather than replaces. It is not an institutional repository — a repository (DSpace, EPrints, Figshare for Institutions) stores and preserves the full text of outputs, while a CRIS records metadata about the wider activity graph and typically harvests from, or pushes to, a repository rather than serving as one. It is not a grants-management system — pre-award and post-award financial administration usually lives in a separate ERP or grants system, with the CRIS consuming award data rather than administering the award. And “CRIS” is not a single product: it is a functional category with several competing commercial and open-source implementations that differ in data model coverage, hosting model, and public-portal design.
Data model: entities and relationships
Internally, CRIS platforms are entity-relationship systems: rather than storing a single flat “item” the way a repository does, a CRIS models discrete research entities — Person, Project, Organisation Unit, Funding, Equipment — and the relationships between them. Most commercial and open-source CRIS products base this layer, wholly or partly, on the CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) data model maintained by euroCRIS. The entity that most CRIS deployments are judged on from the outside is the research output entity — publications, datasets, software, and similar — because that is what feeds public portals and national assessment.
Choosing a CRIS product
The main commercial and open-source options differ mainly in deployment model, harvesting coverage, and how much of the entity layer is exposed to institutional customisation. Pure (Elsevier) and Elements (Symplectic) are the two dominant commercial products in UK/EU/Australian higher education; Converis (Clarivate) competes in the same space. DSpace-CRIS combines repository and CRIS functions in one open-source platform, while VIVO focuses on a linked-data researcher-profile graph. See the CRIS vendor comparison for a feature-by-feature breakdown.
References
- euroCRIS, ‘What is a CRIS?’ (eurocris.org).
- de Castro P., Shearer K., ‘The current state of CRIS systems’ (COAR/euroCRIS joint report, 2020).
Also known as
Current Research Information System · Research Information System
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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