DSpace-CRIS is the first free open-source extension of DSpace for the Research Data and Information Management ever developed. Differently from other (commercial) CRISs 
, DSpace-CRIS has the institutional repository has its core component, providing high visibility on the web to all the collected information and objects.
It is a specific extension of DSpace: it broadens its functionalities and expands its data model while relying on its large Community. DSpace-CRIS is compliant with relevant international standards (such as CERIF, IIIF) to facilitate interoperability and data transfer.
The main characteristic of DSpace-CRIS is its flexible data model, which allows you to collect and manage research data and information typical of a CRIS system, to define entities and attributes with their reciprocal links. If you would just want to enhance the management of authors, provide name variants and IDs such as the ORCiD, exploit the varied ecosystem of persistent identifiers, link researchers to projects, awards, etc., DSpace-CRIS flexible data model can support this without aggravating the management burden of a normal institutional repository, while giving a great added value. Besides, it has useful features such as aggregated bibliometrics and statistics with graphic reporting, CVs and bibliographies, integration with ORCiD API v.2 and much more, you can explore them using the menu on the left.
Its flexibility allows to configure different data models and metadata schemas, allowing the community to find new and creative uses of DSpace-CRIS, such as DSpace-GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) for the Cultural Heritage.
What is a CRIS?
A Current Research Information System (CRIS) - also called Research Information Management System (RIMS) – stores and manages data about research conducted at an institution. Its scope is to provide researchers, managers and administrators, funders and decision makers, with a solid knowledge of the research activities, their outputs and results to inform institutional strategies.
CRIS systems are also useful to evaluate research performance, expose results to find new funding opportunities, avoid duplication of activities, analyze trends, reference to full-text or multimedia scholarly publications, locate new contacts and identify new markets for products of research, disseminate research to support open knowledge.
The DSpace-CRIS’ Vision: Publications are an important component of the research lifecycle: they create links between scholars and they support research administrators in the measurement and decision making processes. However there are many other equally important entities in the research ecosystem that need description, reciprocal links and tracking, such as projects, grants, patents, organization units, researcher profiles (people), etc. Integrating and contextualizing all these entities along with publications, creates great value for each of those entities in terms of visibility, discovery and the understanding of the complexity of the research domain. Nowadays, the most common definition for such integration is “Current Research Information System” (CRIS)
DSpace-CRIS enables the ingestion, storage, display and management of data and metadata for all the abovementioned research entities. This module produces a smooth integration between native DSpace items (publications) and other CRIS entities. All entities can then be linked to each other using autocomplete/lookup functions in the submission/edit phase and/or the inter-navigation in visualizations.
History and maintenance: Two DSpace Committers, Andrea Bollini (4Science) and Luigi Andrea Pascarelli (4Science), are also actively involved in the development and maintenance of DSpace-CRIS (originally developed at Cineca as a project funded by the Hong Kong University). Besides their committment, a larger community is growing around DSpace-CRIS as a means to represent the research domain, see DSpace-CRIS Users.
If and whenever needed, any DSpace-CRIS installation can be easily turned (back) into a basic DSpace installation without the need to change or convert any data. The additional information used by DSpace-CRIS is kept in separate tables, and the integration with the standard DSpace features is provided by the DSpace authority framework.
Stable version
Latest stable version of DSpace-CRIS: 5.8.0 released on 15th Sept 2017
A RC release for DSpace-CRIS 6 is available here: DSpace-CRIS 6.2 RC
it is recommended to use the latest code in the maintenance branch as it includes bug fixes and improvements. Since July 2016 the code is maintained by the original developers in the 4Science repository, free to use for everyone. Feel free to submit your Pull Request to start collaborating with the DSpace-CRIS community
A demo installation running the latest code from the maintenance branch is available here: https://dspace-cris.4science.it/
A test drive installation running the latest RC is available here: http://test.dspace-cris.4science.it
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