Research Information Infrastructure in Ukraine: First steps towards building a national CRIS

Abstract

Development and implementation of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) is one of the most transparent and practical approaches to curate research information on a national level. The process of building and implementing such systems is a complex and time consuming where successful results heavily depend on the established research information infrastructure of a country, the interoperability of the systems and the quality of the information which reside in them. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the existing Ukrainian Research Information Infrastructure and identify which databases could be reused and integrated with a national Ukrainian Current Research Information System (URIS). The analysis showed that there are functional databases and registries that collect data on research activities and could be used as a data sources for the URIS. In particular, the Unified State Electronic Database on Education is a potential data source on higher educational institutions, the National Repository of Academic Texts - on metadata on research output, internal database of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine and database on research projects maintained by Ukrainian Institute of Scientific Technical and Economic Information - on projects. Secondly, it was identified that Ukrainian research infrastructure lacks complete, up-to-date registry on researchers. Finally, we discussed the challenges and solutions for further steps in building national CRIS.