Remodelling Frida

From institutional registration to common registration and responsibility across member institutions

Grete Christina LingjærdeAndora Sjøgren

University of Oslo, Norway

• Current research information system in Norway

• The information system Frida to day

• The process going from Frida to Cristin

• From institutional registration to common registration and

responsibility across member institutions

• The solution going from Frida to Cristin

• Restructuring Frida

• Global and local data

• Benefits of Cristin

• Consequences and Summary

Topics

• The information system Frida to day

• Frida is an information system developed for four of the Norwegian universities

• It is an authoritative system for the documentation of research activities at the individual institutions

• Frida is specific to the individual institution

• Each institution has its own database for registration and controls their own data

Information needs that Frida has to cover

Institutional needs• Internal division/distribution of assets• Presentation/overview of scientific activities• Information for developing an institutional strategy for Research

Activities

Government• Reports to DBH on aggregated level

Financial Model• Research activities are a part of the basis for the grants/funds given to the

universities

Profiling of researchers and research activities

Data model and the authoritative registers

The system contains registers/separate tables of:• periodicals, series• publishers • organizations (institutions) • common code tables.

Frida institutions share these registers. The common use andmaintenance of these registers is an important quality measure in Frida.

The five modules of Frida

• Research results• Projects• Scientists• Research units • Annual reporting

Full-text databases

All universities using Frida today also use open archives to store their publication in full-text, also called open Access-databases

Scientific full-text documents can be delivered to Frida:

• Metadata (title, authors, etc) are registered in Frida

• The full text documents with the metadata are transferred to the open archive of the respective university

NORA: is the organization of the Norwegian Open Research Archives.

The process from Frida to Cristin

From institutional registration to common

registration and responsibility across

member institutions

• Several institutions showed interest in Frida• Within the sectors of higher education, Health

centres and Research Institutes

• Report ”Climate for Research” • The Ministry of Education and Research emphasizes

the importance of easily accessible research results

• The Ministry also emphasizes that research resources should be administered efficiently

A national information system for research activities would be an important step in this direction

• In 2008 the Ministry appointed a committee to consider the possibility of one common system for the three sectors for registration of scientific publications

• The committee also considered the need for a research documentation system that covered other research activities in addition to scientific publications

Premise for a national solution

• Data should be registered only once across the institutions

• The control of and responsibility for the data quality remained at the individual institution

• The committee delivered a report in September 2008.

• A restructured Frida was recommended as the common national system

• Extensive hearing during spring 2009

• In the autumn of 2009 the Ministry decided to follow the recommendations

• A restructured Frida will be the research documentations system for 150 institutions in Norway

• The database for research publications will be called NSI (Norwegian Scientific Index)

• NSI will be included as a component in the national research information system Cristin

The solution going from Frida to Cristin

Restructuring Frida

Global and local data

Data model and VPD

• Prerequisites

• Well founded data model for Frida

• VPD -Virtual Private Database

• Use of Social Security number

The suggested restructuring of Frida will extend sharing of common data and at the same time maintain the institutional perspective or view of the system.

Global and local data

We introduced two concepts and divided the data between them: A global part that means a common /shared part and A local part that means the institutionally specific part.

•The global components/concepts are those that do not need to be registered more than once and where it is acceptable to share information both in respect of registration and viewing between the institutions.

•The local components are those that do not contain duplicate information, but contain institutionally specific information where only a certain institution has the rights necessary to register data or change the data content.

Global and local level in Cristin

Part of the new data model of Cristin

• Benefits of Cristin

Benefits of Cristin

• No need to make a separate view/presentation of data for a national presentation

• The number of duplicates will be reduced

• Data is more suited for statistics and data-warehousing for advanced sophisticated analysis of data

• Reuse of what is already implemented in Frida makes restructuring possible at reduced costs

Benefits of Cristin

• Common data is not duplicated in the institutional databases

• Disjoint and private data are stored in the institutionally specific areas of the database

• The institutionally specific view, ownership and control of are retained

• Rationalization. Closing similar systems and focusing on one system will benefit more users and stakeholders

• Consequences and Summary

Consequences

• The data model is becoming more complicated

• The institutions must adjust to common deadlines and obey common rules

• All the institutions depend on each other. Data registration must be done within a reasonable timeframe.

Consequences

• The solution requires that a user has to log in via one institution.

• Existing data in Frida will be converted to the new Cristin structure.

Consequences

• Quality assurance. Many business rules and functions have been implemented in the system, and common rules for registration have been worked out.

• Approval of data. All data records that will be reported to the Ministry have to be approved by someone other than the researcher.

Summary

• One common research documentation system for all research institutions in Norway.

• Easy to search for, retrieve and compare data between different institutions.

• Cristin may in the future function as the Yellow Pages of scientific activities in Norway.

• Cristin will make more of the data shared by the institutions while maintaining an institutional view, ownership and responsibility of data.

• The system will simultaneously satisfy both institutional and national needs.