Jan Fransen
Service Lead for RIM Systems
University of Minnesota
Rebecca Bryant
Senior Program Officer
OCLC Research
Research information management (RIM) systems, also often called Current Research Information Systems (CRISs), aggregate, curate, and utilize metadata about research activities. While RIM activities are of long practice in Europe, there is now growing adoption by North American institutions, as institutions seek improved information for reporting and strategic decision-making, and also require improved workflows to support processes such as faculty activity reporting. In this presentation, we will share findings from the recently published “Practices and Patterns in Research Information Management: Findings from a Global Survey.” Aggregating responses of nearly 400 survey respondents from 40 nations, this report provides the most comprehensive view of international RIM practices to date, and offers insights into incentives, uses, interoperability, persistent identifiers, metadata harvesting practices, and the increasing merging of repository and RIM workflows. We will particularly highlight regional distinctions, as this study confirms a previously anecdotal understanding of broadly divergent practices in Europe and North America.