The role of CRIS’s in the research life cycle. A case study on implementing a FAIR RDM policy at Radboud University, the Netherlands

In 2015, Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) started a project to extend its CRIS (Metis) with functionalities that allow researchers to register (metadata) and archive (uploading files) their research data, while at the same time making the data available for reuse in a FAIR way (via national Dutch data archive DANS). The new functionality was integrated with already existing functions in the CRIS, thus offering a one-stop-shop interface to researchers in which registration and archiving of data is combined with registration of publications, the uploading of full text to the university’s repository, the linking of datasets and publications and the creation of researcher’s profile (CV) pages. Next to the functional extension of the CRIS, the project also included an organizational element: the establishment of support and management structures and workflows, including data curation processes, in order to assure the quality of the data registration process and to foster the FAIRness of the research data. In the period up to now, we continued to transform the university’s CRIS, by bringing it in line with the research life cycle perspective and policy changes in Research Data Management (RDM), including a Data Management Plan (DMP) module and FAIR data. In this paper, it will be argued and demonstrated that both for researchers and research institutes, a CRIS oriented approach to RDM brings added value. We also point to future use cases that put a central role for CRIS’s even earlier within the research life cycle, e.g. at pre-registration of research questions and informed consent/ethics approval procedures. We further envision our CRIS to play a linking pin function between storage and service locations of data during research and at publication. The paper will use Radboud University as a good practice of past, present and future use of CRIS’s in the research life cycle that universities and research institutes as well as researchers and research support desks are currently dealing with in the FAIR data era.