JISC

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UK Higher Education institutions exchange information about research activities with a variety of other institutions and statutory customers for a range of operational and reporting reasons.  Information exchange is one aspect of an institution’s need to manage information about the research carried out within their institutions and the staff and students that carry out that research.

Executive summary

There are complex information flows around the HE sector for research information. Information flows from institutions to HEFCE, Research Councils (RCs), HESA and other institutions. Additionally there are data flows between HESA, HEFCE, and RCs.  The amount of resource spent sharing research information between data users can be radically reduced by the introduction of a common standard. The EXRI-UK report proposed that the CERIF 2008 (Common European Research Information Format) be adopted as a standard for UK HE research information interchange.

The standard is technically a European Union recommendation to member states and responsibility for maintenance of the standard resides with EuroCRIS; a not for profit association of Current Research Information System (CRIS) experts. Systems based on CERIF can be found throughout the European Union HE sector. In addition there are several large scale national systems such as FRiDA, FRIS and METIS all of which are based on CERIF.

The introduction of such a standard will affect not only institutions but national funding bodies, research councils and HESA. The introduction of a standard can be seen as a ‘good idea’  but this is not a sufficient reason to invest in adopting it and the costs and benefits need to be assessed to ensure that by adopting the standard there is a net benefit to the sector as a whole.

Significant amounts of resource are spent developing and maintaining interfaces to support communicating with funders and other institutions, the acceptance of a single standard interface will, along with other benefits, significantly reduce the costs associated with information interchange. It is reported that institutions spend £85 million each year submitting and monitoring grant applications to research councils and the RAE 2008 Accountability Review reported a sector cost of £47,335,706 or £1,127 per researcher submitted. For a (non-existent) average university this would represent an expenditure of about £600,000 per annum. Depending on the activity, this report projects savings of between 25% and 30% following the deployment of a CERIF compatible CRIS. For this example savings of approximately £177,000 per annum per HEI could be realised. The Research Council’s plans for collecting research outcomes are evolving but, based on figures from the FRIS project in Flanders, a CERIF to CERIF collection system could, eventually, deliver efficiency savings to the sector of £94,500,000 per annum.

In the wake of the RAE 2008 and in anticipation of the REF there is a significant amount of activity in HE institutions to redevelop and upgrade research management systems. It is estimated that between ten and fifteen percent of UK HE institutions already have CERIF compliant CRISs.  Research shows that the principal reasons for deploying new CRISs are the REF and the need to provide a better service to end users. The adoption of a CERIF CRIS will support both these strategic aims and at the same time realise financial and other benefits such as better management information, data driven web pages and increased transparency. Precise costs of a CRIS are very variable depending on a variety of factors including size of institution and the preferred supplier but for the ‘average’ institution are estimated at £15,665 annually over a ten year system life-cycle.

Of itself the CERIF standard is not a sufficient reason to replace fit-for-purpose systems. However those institutions with no plans to replace their Research Information Management (RIM) systems can still realise significant benefits by installing a CERIF ‘wrapper’ to act as an interface between their internal data structures and the external environment. The cost of developing a CERIF wrapper is estimated at £13,000.

The above figures should be treated with some caution as they represent averages and in some cases projections. However they do give an indication of the probable scale of costs and benefits. Institutions are encouraged to use the formulae contained in this document to model their own cost benefits but should also be aware that there are other, significant, benefits that are less tangible.

Installing CERIF compatible systems will deliver benefits to institutions but for the full benefits to be realised HEFCE, the Research Councils and, possibly, HESA will need to implement CERIF compatible data collection mechanisms. All three agencies are confident that their internal systems (i.e. not external facing) are currently fit for purpose and have no short term plans for system redevelopment.

HEFCE will redevelop the data collection system deployed for RAE 2008 to meet the requirements of the REF. They are keen to support a new standard while at the same time do not wish to be seen to impose it on the sector. Consequently they will be deploying a CERIF compatible import/export interface as one of the alternatives that are available to institutions. The cost of this is minor at an annualised rate of approximately £2,600. The benefits to HEFCE are not directly financial but through CERIF to CERIF data transfers they will almost certainly gain in more timely and accurate information from institutions and make reputational gains through being seen to actively support a move towards standardisation of data within the sector.

The major interface between the Research Councils and institutions is the Je-S system for research funding applications and systems for gathering research output information. Until recently the Research Councils had planned to develop a new Research Output System but this has now been shelved and the existing three systems owned by individual councils will be developed. The councils calculate that the cost of developing an individual CERIF interface to one of their systems at £13,000. However if all four possible interfaces were developed there would be some economies of scale and the RCs calculate a total cost of £40,000. While this figure is a substantial cost to the Research Councils, in comparison to the savings that could be realised by institutions it is very modest. As for HEFCE, the benefits to Research Councils are not directly financial but through CERIF to CERIF data transfers they will almost certainly gain in more timely and accurate information from institutions and make reputational gains through being seen to actively support a move towards standardisation of data within the sector. Additionally the greater consistency of data may make peer review of grant applications more straight forward.

Currently HESA only collect a small amount of data that is in the research domain. The recent announcement that HESA will provide HEFCE with REF data on research funding and research students may expand the scope of their activity and data coverage, but currently they do not anticipate any significant impact from the CERIF standard.

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