Research information management (RIM) allows third level institutions to collect, analyse and report on their research activities, in turn informing strategy and promoting research outputs. RIM involves policy, workflows and integration and interoperability between systems at the institutional and supra-institutional level. Although Irish institutions currently vary in their readiness for RIM, there are a number of drivers of development in this area, both external and internal.

External Drivers
o Open Access mandates from funders and journal publishers for both research publications and research data.
o Possible REF-like framework coming to Ireland
o Broad trend towards increasing “openness” in scholarly communication and other domains, e.g. Open Science, Open (Government) Data, Open Source, Open Hardware

Internal Drivers
o The desire of researchers and institutions to make their research outputs more visible, and to increase and track citations
o Improvement and streamlining of back-office processes in the research support
o Access to high-quality and timely information to support the strategic management of research in an institution.

We will convene a panel to examine current policy and practice in research information management, and how technology can support the goals of RIM across different institutions in Ireland. This topic is of increasing importance to the research community and - by extension - to all the departments and individuals providing infrastructure and support services in those institutions.

The panel will outline the rationale for RIM, identifying the key components of the services and explain how they interact through various workflows and processes. We will also provide a review of international best practice in digital repositories, CRIS, and research data management from both a technological and policy perspective and introduce some key technologies to the conference.

We will then provide case studies from a number of institutions of different sizes. This will provide a snapshot of the national landscape, including the current state of policy and IRs across the institutions, and will address challenges in current implementations including technical, staffing, academic engagement. We will also discuss the current state of alignment with national and international standards and organisations such as CERIF, OpenAIRE, COAR and RIAN, and the adoption of ORCID in Ireland.

Finally we will ask what are the appropriate next steps to improve RIM in the community. Is there an opportunity now for institutions to work together to respond to the H2020 mandate for Open Data from 2017? What policies do we need our institutions and funding agencies to put in place to support RIM? What practical steps can we take together to ensure scalable and sustainable RIM systems across Ireland into the future?

We expect a lively Q&A as the intention of this panel is to broaden the discussion of RIM beyond the research specialists, to the broader academic IT community.

If you require information about any aspect of the conference please contact: Fi Coyle: fi.coyle@heanet.ie / +353 1 6609040