Keeping Up With… Research Information Management Systems

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This edition of Keeping Up With… was written by Rebecca Bryant and Mark Zulauf.

Rebecca Bryant is Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research, email: bryantr@oclc.org.

Mark Zulauf is Researcher Information Systems Coordinator at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, email: zulauf@illinois.edu.

Introduction

Research information management systems (RIMS) support the transparent aggregation, curation, and use of data about institutional research activities. [1] In other words, RIMS can be used to create a dynamic registry of the institutional scholarly record.

Commonly known as current research information systems (CRIS) in Europe, the terminology has been less standardized in the United States, including “research networking systems” or “expert finder systems”—and such systems have often been developed to support a single use case. RIMS represent a rapidly growing area of investment for US research institutions.

The Library as a RIMS Leader

Libraries can play an important leadership role in research information management. Bibliographic metadata will be a significant part of any RIMS implementation, so the library naturally makes sense as a major collaborator. Furthermore, librarians are experts on numerous publication databases and indexes that may serve as metadata sources, and they know, support, and use the standards, persistent identifiers (PIDs), and vocabularies necessary to support disambiguation and duplicate management.

Leverage Campus Partnerships

A RIMS’ value derives from its dataset, and a RIMS that offers diverse, timely, and trustworthy data will sustain multiple distinct use cases in support of institutional goals. Libraries must partner with other campus units to enrich the RIMS with research activity data beyond publications (grants, research equipment, patents, news releases, honorific awards). Such an endeavor requires the development of numerous partnerships within the institutional research development community (grant specialists, technology licensing agents, facilities managers, communications directors, etc.) to adequately understand and integrate these data into the RIMS from their traditional, authoritative campus silos. The result is a powerful research graph providing otherwise impossible institutional insights, such as understanding the number and type of publications resulting from the use of a specific facility or piece of equipment. [2]

Use Cases

A 2021 publication by OCLC Research described six discrete RIMS use cases:

  • Public portal – a site featuring profiles of an institution’s affiliated researchers and their works to support expertise discovery and institutional reputation management.
  • Metadata reuse – the repurposing of RIMS data for dynamic updates to faculty or unit web pages or directories via application programming interface (API) or similar exchange.
  • Strategic reporting and decision support – the use of RIMS data to support reports, visualizations, and actionable recommendations—frequently to answer institutional queries about research impact and collaboration networks.
  • Faculty activity reporting – processes that support annual academic progress reviews and/or promotion and tenure (P&T) workflows for academic staff.
  • Open access workflows – the streamlining of processes encouraging deposit of open research into institutional repositories, adding convenience, improving metadata, and increasing discoverability and access.
  • Compliance monitoring – the tracking and reporting to ensure both individual and institutional compliance with external requirements, such as those potentially associated with awarded grants. [3]

Product Space

RIMS in the United States represent a separate but complementary service category to institutional repositories, which collect, preserve, and disseminate the full text of intellectual outputs but usually offer an incomplete view of the overall institutional scholarly record. However, these categories sometimes merge, particularly in Europe. [4]

Prominent North American commercial products:

Open source solutions:

Related products (specifically supporting faculty activity reporting):

ORCID also plays an important role, as an increasing number of RIMS (including all the above) can be integrated with the ORCID registry. This allows for the—potentially automated—transfer of locally curated research activity data across multiple systems, thereby reducing the data reentry burden on faculty while simultaneously propagating trustworthy data.

RIMS Support Open Research and Scholarship

RIMS play an increasingly important role in the implementation and monitoring of open science policies worldwide. For example, local and national infrastructures are maturing in Europe to support open access monitoring and compliance with funder policies. [5] RIMS can capture data about research outputs and their relationship with other entities like funders, authors, and license information—especially by leveraging open persistent identifiers, such as those for authors (ORCID), publications (DOI), and institutional affiliations (ROR). This rich database enables linking outputs unambiguously and efficiently with funding sources, monitoring compliance with open access policies, and supporting discovery of open content through a public interface.

Notes

[1] Bryant, Rebecca, Jan Fransen, Pablo de Castro. Brenna Helmstutler, and David Scherer. 2021. Research Information Management in the United States: Part 1—Findings and Recommendations. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research, 1,7.  https://doi.org/10.25333/8hgy-s428.

[2] Bryant, Rebecca. “Supporting institutional reporting needs with RIM systems,” Hanging Together: the OCLC Research blog, 8 Dec 2022. https://hangingtogether.org/supporting-institutional-reporting-needs-with-rim-systems/.

[3] Bryant, Rebecca, Jan Fransen, Pablo de Castro. Brenna Helmstutler, and David Scherer. 2021. Research Information Management in the United States: Part 1—Findings and Recommendations. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research, 8, 11-15. https://doi.org/10.25333/8hgy-s428.

[4] Joachim Schöpfel and Otmane Azeroual, “Current Research Information Systems and Institutional Repositories: From Data Ingestion to Convergence and Merger,” in Future Directions in Digital Information: Predictions, Practice, Participation, Chandos Digital Information Review (Elsevier, 2021), 19–37, https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-822144-0.00002-1.

[5] de Castro, Pablo, "The Role of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) in Supporting Open Science Implementation: The Case of Strathclyde". ITlib. Informačné technológie a knižnice Special Issue (2018), 21–30, http://hdl.handle.net/11366/691; Mertens, Jan, “A funder’s perspective on how linking and integrating research data can advance open science and research assessment,” euroCRIS membership meeting 2023, Brussels, 31 May 2023, http://hdl.handle.net/11366/2466.

Examples of US RIMS Implementations

Communities of Practice

Further Reading 

Brown, Josh. “All about FLOW: ORCID and Research Information Management Systems.” ORCID blog (blog), April 14, 2016. https://info.orcid.org/all-about-flow-orcid-and-research-information-management-systems/.

Bryant, Rebecca. “A Marathon, Not a Sprint: Implementing Research Information Management Systems (RIMS) in the US.” Hanging Together, the OCLC Research Blog (blog), March 7, 2024. https://hangingtogether.org/a-marathon-not-a-sprint-implementing-research-information-management-systems-rims-in-the-us/.

Bryant, Rebecca, Anna Clements, Pablo de Castro, Joanne Cantrell, Annette Dortmund, Jan Fransen, Peggy Gallagher, and Michele Mennielli. 2018. Practices and Patterns in Research Information Management: Findings from a Global Survey. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research. https://doi.org/10.25333/BGFG-D241.

Bryant, Rebecca, Anna Clements, Carol Feltes, David Groenewegen, Simon Huggard, Holly Mercer, Roxanne Missingham, Maliaca Oxnam, Anne Rauh, and John Wright. 2017. Research Information Management: Defining RIM and the Library’s Role. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research. https://doi.org/10.25333/C3NK88.   

Day, Annette. "Research Information Management: How the Library Can Contribute to the Campus Conversation." New Review of Academic Librarianship 24, no. 1 (2018): 23-34. Accessed December 2, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2017.1333014.

Givens, Marlee. 2016. "Keeping Up With... Research Information Systems." Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/rims.

Pablo de Castro, Ulrich Herb, Laura Rothfritz, & Joachim Schöpfel. (2023). Persistent identifiers for research instruments and facilities: an emerging PID domain in need of coordination. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7330372.

Fabre, Renaud, Daniel Egret, Joachim Schöpfel, and Otmane Azeroual. “Evaluating the Scientific Impact of Research Infrastructures: The Role of Current Research Information Systems.” Quantitative Science Studies, 2021, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00111.

Scherer, David, Kate Byrne, Mark Hahnel, and Daniel Valen. “Collaborative Approaches to Integrate Repositories within the Research Information Ecosystem: Creating Bridges for Common Goals.” Serials Librarian 78, no. 1–4 (2020): 181–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2020.1728169.