On February 28th 2013 a CERIF UK Coordination Meeting was held at Prospero House in London, to identify the priorities for a feasible and sustainable CERIF coordination and implementation roadmap from ongoing activities in the UK Research Information Management (RIM) space. The current wider CERIF UK landscape is depicted as follows.
Before the meeting, an open spreadsheet has been prepared listing the ongoing activities, the organisations engaged and the outputs available (reflected in the above image). The spreadsheet was meant as a start for add-ons and is still open for extension and not yet to be considered final: http://bit.ly/13PWJqq
Many UK HEIs now use CERIF-based systems and work continues to ensure that funders’ systems to collect information about research outputs can accept information from universities in this standard format. Emerging national infrastructures such as RCUK’s Gateway to Research are based on CERIF and a CERIF-XML interface for the REF submission system is being prepared for addition during the first half of 2013. These developments are increasingly complemented by international activities within CASRAI and VIVO.
However, consistent implementation and standards development requires coordination. The meeting provided an overview of ongoing and past activities, the organisations engaged and the outputs and assets resulting from them to highlight the need for sustainability and to determine which of them require further development, maintenance and dissemination. Coordinated action is necessary to enable their consistent re-use and implementation. The meeting was an opportunity to identify what the current priorities and issues are and the commitments that can be made for the next steps forward.
In the end, it was clear that coordination is work and requires human resources and organisations to support the efforts, i.e. the work also needs to secure continued funding beyond June 2013.
A report and related material will be made available shortly.