CERIF

CERIF
Name	CERIF
Native name	Common European Research Information Format
Formation	2000s
Type	Data model / Standard
Purpose	Research information management
Region served	Europe, International
Parent organization	euroCRIS

CERIF

CERIF is a formal data model and metadata standard for research information used to describe projects, publications, persons, organizations, facilities, funding, and related relationships. It supports exchange between institutional repositories, research information management systems, and national databases, aiming to enable integration across systems operated by bodies such as European Commission, Horizon 2020, European Research Council, National Institutes of Health, and Wellcome Trust. The model underpins services provided by platforms associated with OpenAIRE, Pure (Elsevier), Converis (Clarivate), Symplectic Elements, and national aggregators like ResearchFish, HEFCE, and Jisc.

Overview

CERIF defines entities and relationships to represent scholarly activity connecting persons, organizations, outputs, projects, funding, equipment, and services. It facilitates semantics-driven integration akin to initiatives by W3C, Dublin Core, ISO, NISO, and aligns with vocabularies used by ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, PubMed, and Scopus. Institutions including University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley have mapped local systems to CERIF to enable reporting to agencies like European Commission, UK Research and Innovation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, and National Science Foundation.

History and Development

Work on the model was fostered by collaborative networks of research information managers and funding bodies across Europe, supported by organizations such as euroCRIS, European Commission, CORDIS, and national ministries in France, Germany, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Spain. Early adopters included research information projects at University of Amsterdam, Technical University of Berlin, Université de Strasbourg, Trinity College Dublin, and Karolinska Institutet. Influences came from bibliographic standards used by Library of Congress, British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and citation infrastructures like Crossref and Scopus. The evolution paralleled digital library advances at Springer Nature, Elsevier, IEEE, and data initiatives from UNESCO and OECD.

Data Model and Core Entities

CERIF's conceptual schema specifies core entities: Person, Organization, Project, Publication, Result, Facility, Service, and Funding, linked by rich relationship classes and temporal attributes. Implementations map identifiers shared with registries such as ORCID, ISNI, ROR, Grid.ac, Crossref Funder Registry, and DataCite to enable persistent discovery across platforms hosted by Zenodo, Figshare, Dryad, Harvard Dataverse, and Amazon Web Services. The model supports multilingual labels and vocabularies drawn from thesauri like MeSH, ACM Computing Classification System, Library of Congress Subject Headings, and controlled lists maintained by Eurostat and UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

Implementation and Tools

There are reference implementations, converters, and tooling provided by vendors and communities: mapping tools used by Elsevier, extract-transform-load solutions from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and open-source projects on GitHub; CERIF-aware CRIS products include Pure (Elsevier), Symplectic Elements, Converis (Clarivate), Digital Science Elements, and institutional repositories like DSpace, EPrints, and Invenio. Integration leverage middleware such as Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, and PostgreSQL with extensions like PostGIS for spatial metadata. Workflows often use identity services from ORCID, authentication via Shibboleth, and APIs adhering to patterns popularized by RESTful API adopters like GitHub and Twitter.

Standards and Interoperability

CERIF interoperates with international standards and registries including Dublin Core, RDF, OWL, SKOS, ISO 690, and FRBR. Mappings to persistent identifier infrastructures—ORCID, DOI (Crossref/DataCite), ISBN, ISSN, ISNI—enable linking to publication and dataset metadata maintained by Crossref, DataCite, PubMed Central, Scopus, Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics), and aggregator services like OpenAIRE. Harmonization efforts reference policy frameworks advocated by European Commission research data policies, Horizon Europe, and recommendations from OECD and G7 science ministers.

Use Cases and Applications

Typical applications include national CRIS aggregates such as those run by Flanders Research Area, CRIS Portugal, Swedish National Data Service, reporting pipelines to Horizon Europe portals, institutional analytics at Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, and University of Tokyo, and integration of publication repositories like arXiv, bioRxiv, and SSRN. CERIF supports impact assessment workflows used by assessment exercises like Research Excellence Framework and funding allocation systems at European Research Council, National Science Foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and philanthropic funders such as Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation. It is used in matchmaking services connecting researchers with projects, facilities, and funders run by platforms linked to CORDIS, ResearchGate, LinkedIn, and national portals.

Governance and Maintenance

Maintenance and promotion are coordinated by communities and organizations including euroCRIS, national CRIS consortia in Sweden, France, Netherlands, and Italy, and stakeholder groups involving universities, publishers, and funders like European Commission, Wellcome Trust, and UK Research and Innovation. Standard updates are discussed at conferences and working groups alongside events organized by OpenAIRE, SHARE, CASRAI, and international meetings of research information managers. Technical custodianship involves collaborations with standards bodies such as W3C and national standards institutes like DIN and AFNOR.

Category:Research information systems