Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A Pure deployment exporting CERIF-XML over OAI-PMH for OpenAIRE harvesting.
- Is an instance
A national funder's project database joinable to institutional CRIS records via Crossref Funder ID and RAiD.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Manually pasting data between two CRIS systems is not interoperability.
- Not an instance
Two separate CRIS installations that share no schema or protocol are not interoperable.
Editorial commentary
CRIS interoperability is the capacity of Current Research Information Systems to exchange data with each other and with adjacent systems — repositories, funders, publishers, aggregators — without manual re-entry. It rests on three pillars, tracked as a coordinated technical and policy programme by euroCRIS and the COAR/euroCRIS CRIS-IR working group: shared models (what entities and relationships are exchanged), shared protocols (how the exchange happens), and shared identifiers (how the entities being exchanged are joined unambiguously across systems).
The three pillars in practice
The model pillar is CERIF (Common European Research Information Format), whose care and custody the European Union handed to euroCRIS; it defines standard entity types (person, organisation unit, project, publication, funding) and the relationships between them. The protocol pillar has historically meant OAI-PMH for CERIF-XML harvesting, with ResourceSync for incremental synchronisation and REST-based APIs (as used by systems like Pure) increasingly supplementing it. The identifier pillar is what actually lets records minted in independent systems be joined without ambiguity: ORCID iD for people, ROR for organisations, DOI for outputs, RAiD for projects, and Crossref Funder ID for funders — see identifier crosswalk for how these get connected when a single record needs more than one.
Where the pillars are operationalised
The OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers turn the three pillars into a concrete, versioned CERIF-XML export profile that a CRIS can be tested against — a system’s practical interoperability is usually demonstrated by whether it can produce a valid Guidelines-conformant export via OAI-PMH, not just by claiming CERIF support in principle. The Guidelines are actively maintained by euroCRIS and OpenAIRE and revised periodically; treat any specific version number as a point-in-time fact to re-check against euroCRIS’s own documentation rather than a fixed standard.
References
- Bryant R., de Castro P. et al., ‘Practices and Patterns in RIM/CRIS Interoperability’ (OCLC/COAR/euroCRIS joint reports).
Also known as
CRIS-IR interoperability
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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