Dear colleagues,

As any frequent reader of this list knows, Open Access is often deeply controversial from a political viewpoint. One of the most subtle approaches to the issue one has had the opportunity to listen to was delivered by a prominent member of the Open Access and research information management in the UK, who mentioned the "fragile consensus" around OA in the country shortly after the so-called Finch Report and the original RCUK OA policy were released.

One of the areas where this sort of fragile consensus has traditionally been more evident is the discussion about institutional repositories vs research information management systems (aka CRISs). It is somewhat surprising that in these times of publish-or-perish information explosion there is so little bibliography on this particular topic of the sometimes difficult and always swiftly-evolving coexistence of IRs and CRISs, but there are multiple factors that may explain such scarcity.

The recent release by the Repository Observatory of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) of a thoroughly-documented piece about CRIS/IR (or IR/CRIS) interoperability may then come in handy for providing an up-to-date description of the landscape at a time when a new edition of the Open Access Week is about to be kicked-off. The “7 things you need to know about repositories and CRIS” text tries to address the "false CRIS/IR dichotomy" -- as accurately dubbed in a UKCoRR blogpost -- in a neutral, dispassionate way, trying to illustrate the historical evolution of the relation between both platforms and making emphasis on the current, very strong trend towards system interoperability. A complementary set of materials ranging from a number of IR-CRIS profiles at specific institutions and initiatives in the UK and Portugal to a recorded round table discussion with experts in the field allows this COAR release to address most of the relevant issues around CRIS/IR interoperability, including a hint at the research information management areas it might be applied to in the near future. 

I hope this may be of interest to some readers of this list. This new Repository Observatory release is available at https://www.coar-repositories.org/activities/repository-observatory/third-edition-ir-and-cris/.

Regards,

Pablo

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Pablo de Castro

PASTEUR4OA Project Consultant

euroCRIS Board member -- Best Practice/DRIS Task Group Leader

ORCID Technical Steering Group member

GrandIR Ltd.

5/5 Eyre Crescent

Edinburgh

Scotland

United Kingdom

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