A Brief Description of the Development of the Norwegian Research Information Repository

10 pages•Published: October 19, 2026

Jan Erik Garshol and Anders Eivind Bråten

Abstract

The Norwegian Research Information Repository (NVA) is a national, open-source infrastructure for documenting current Norwegian research activities and results and underpins national reporting to the Norwegian Scientific Index (NVI). It is deployed as a service-oriented, serverless platform on AWS, comprising 225 microservices across 16 independent deployment groups, using a graph data model aligned with FAIR principles and persistent identifiers. Developed over seven years with more than 40 contributors and first launched in June 2020, NVA reached full national production scale in September 2025, serving 160+ research institutions, approximately 30,000 researchers — around 69% of all Norwegian academic researchers — and some 3,500 curators and administrators. The platform has enabled the Norwegian government to effectively mandate open access for publicly funded research and provides institutions with shared tools, workflows, and best practices for research documentation. The first complete national NVI reporting cycle was successfully completed in April 2026, marking the final milestone of the transition from a fragmented landscape of over 80 separate institutional repositories and a parallel CRIS system. The paper describes the historical context, development process, technical architecture, achieved results, lessons learned, and future work, offering practical guidance when developing national-scale research information infrastructures.

Keyphrases: national cris, norway, open science, open source software, research information repository, research infrastructures

In: Pablo de Castro and Joachim Schöpfel (editors). Proceedings of 17th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems, vol 5, pages 54-63.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/ZWls
	https://doi.org/10.29007/kfdl

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{CRIS2026:Brief_Description_Development_Norwegian,
  author    = {Jan Erik Garshol and Anders Eivind Bråten},
  title     = {A Brief Description of the Development of the Norwegian Research Information Repository},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of 17th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems},
  editor    = {Pablo de Castro and Joachim Schöpfel},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Technology},
  volume    = {5},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2516-2322},
  url       = {/publications/paper/ZWls},
  doi       = {10.29007/kfdl},
  pages     = {54-63},
  year      = {2026}}

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