After a two-year break due to the pandemic, CRIS 2022 was held in person in the beautiful city of Dubrovnik, Croatia… Maybe you know this city if you are a fan of Game of Thrones.
Throughout the conference, VIVO had a strong presence. The Berlin University Alliance, (BUA) who are new members of VIVO, presented their CRIS implementation with information aggregated from all the universities in the alliance using VIVO (https://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/1968. Additionally, Dragan Ivanovic presented the CERIF2VIVO mapping project (https://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/1972), discussed the improvements for CERIF, and invited attendees to participate in the project.
An entire track was dedicated to VIVO presentations, and it had a strong showing. In this track, the collaboration agreement between euroCRIS and VIVO was presented by Anna Guillaumet, the chair of the session. Bruce Herbert, the VIVO chair, gave a great update on the VIVO project, presenting the organization, its structure, and the roadmap, as well as the relevant work linking Dspace with VIVO (https://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/2003).
Washington Segundo, of the Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology, under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation of Brasil, presented the project to implement a research portal with aggregated information from all universities in the country, using VIVO (https://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/1974). This is an ambitious project that we’re looking forward to seeing come to fruition.
Paul Albert from Weill Cornell presented (in a pre-recorded format) an interesting initiative to manage conflicts of interest with VIVO (https://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/1982). Finally, Bruce Herbert presented ways that Texas A&M University Library increased VIVO services to academics during the pandemic https://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/2001).
In addition to presentations related directly to VIVO, the conference highlighted many initiatives that are implementing research information management systems by aggregating data from more than one institution, creating regional or national CRIS systems. A number of roundtable discussions and workshops on the subject highlighted that these initiatives typically work in isolation, and it was suggested that a network should be created to share experiences and best practices.
There was also much discussion on aspects of ethics in research, interoperability of systems, open science, data protection and copyright and identifiers, where it seems that once ORCID has been imposed as the main indicator for authors, identifying grants/projects uniquely is the next challenge. There were many interesting and relevant topics, and it was wonderful to see them in person.
Here’s a link to all presentations and I hope you’ll take some time to browse these fascinating initiatives, although it won’t be as picturesque as the actual venue in Dubrovnik!