The Italian Model of Distributed Research Information Management Systems: A Case Study

Abstract The present contribution is divided into two parts. The first part, written by Susanna Mornati, describes the impressive progress of the CRIS adoption in Italy, brought forward as a personal experience leading the CRIS team. In less than one year, starting from September 2014 to July 2015, sixty-six Italian institutions (mostly universities and some research centres) adopted the same platform, a version of DSpace-CRIS called IRIS, customized for the Italian research environment. DSpace-CRIS provides an institutional Open-Access repository built in the solution: this was a unique opportunity to make publication data available on the Internet at a national level and gain insight on the Italian scientific production across several years. Moreover, the rapid adoption of ORCID at a national level gave the opportunity to enhance the quality of metadata. The second part, written by Paola Galimberti, presents the results of her research on data extracted at a national level from the areas of Biology, Humanities and Social Sciences. For the first time in Italy these data were available in a standard then comparable format. The research hypothesis was to verify if and how the research assessment exercises of organizational structures (institutions and their departments) and of individuals had any influence on the publishing choices of Italian researchers. As a conclusion, the results are not univocal, and additional investigations are necessary for a deeper understanding of the phenomena taking place.