Adrdress / Ed Simons

Dear Reader,

Research Information Systems, commonly called CRIS, increasingly take a central place as key information resources within the field of research. Originally (starting some 30 years ago) meant and conceived as administrative systems for reporting and performance measure of research, merely of use to research administrators, CRIS in the course of time have evolved into multifunctional systems with a clear added value to all those involved in research, be it research managers, policy makers, funders or – last but not least – the researchers themselves. Apart from their traditional administrative functions, CRIS nowadays may include tools for on line profiling of research, both on an institutional and individual level, researcher CV generation and exposure, benchmarking and monitoring of research, research funding application, and even – a very recent development – research data archiving and data management plan functionality. As such CRIS are more and more becoming primary research information resources, both on an institutional and (inter)national level, acting as a source for other systems and applications related to research, such as institutional repositories and research(er) web pages, national funder and governmental systems and even (and already starting up in some cases) for international systems such as OpenAIRE or the ORCiD researcher profile database. Given their broad coverage of rich and interlinked metadata on almost all aspects and objects of research CRIS further could well turn out to be corner stones for the realization of FAIR Open Science infrastructures, such as the envisaged European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The contributions in this journal issue, coming from various countries, clearly echo these developments and – as President of euroCRIS, the International Organisation for  Research information – I am very pleased to notice that together they point into the direction of a common vision on the role of CRIS, taking shape within Europe. I wish you a happy and interesting read.

Ed Simons
President of euroCRIS