CRIS2026: Editor's Preface

CRIS2026: Research Information Management in Transition

The 17th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (CRIS2026) was held in Ponta Delgada, Azores (Portugal), from 20 to 22 May 2026. Organised jointly by euroCRIS, the Universidade dos Açores, and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) through its FCCN digital services, the conference brought together researchers, research managers, librarians, software developers, policy makers, infrastructure providers and institutional leaders from across Europe and beyond. Building on decades of CRIS conferences, CRIS2026 once again confirmed the role of this event as a major international forum for exchange and reflection on research information management.

The conference was organised under the theme “Reshaping the CRIS Role in the Context of AI, Open Infrastructures, Open Source, and Research Evaluation.” This theme reflects the profound transformations currently affecting research information management. Research information systems are no longer confined to documenting institutional research outputs. They have become strategic infrastructures supporting open science, responsible research assessment, interoperability between scholarly services, institutional decision-making, and national and international science policies. At the same time, the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence, the increasing importance of persistent identifiers and research knowledge graphs, and the growing convergence between CRIS, repositories and other scholarly infrastructures are opening new opportunities while raising important technical, organisational and ethical questions.

The purpose of CRIS2026 was therefore not only to present new systems and technological innovations, but also to encourage discussion about the changing place of research information systems within an increasingly interconnected scholarly ecosystem. Throughout the three days of the conference, participants exchanged experiences, discussed emerging challenges and explored innovative solutions for the management, integration and exploitation of research information. The contributions and discussions addressed how CRIS can contribute to improving data quality, facilitating interoperability, supporting responsible research assessment, enabling FAIR and open science practices, and integrating new types of research objects and activities.

These discussions are closely aligned with the mission of euroCRIS, the international organisation for research information. Founded in 2002, euroCRIS promotes the development and adoption of research information systems through community building, international collaboration, standards development and knowledge exchange. The organisation maintains and develops CERIF (Common European Research Information Format), supports interoperability across research information infrastructures, organises the biennial CRIS conferences and regular Membership Meetings, and fosters working groups and collaborative projects addressing emerging topics such as artificial intelligence, national and regional CRIS networking, repository integration and research information standards. By bringing together practitioners, researchers, institutions, software providers and policy organisations, euroCRIS provides an international platform where technical innovation and strategic reflection can continuously inform one another.

A changing landscape for research information management

Several major issues emerged across the conference programme. Perhaps the most visible was artificial intelligence. AI is rapidly becoming part of the research information landscape, with potential applications ranging from metadata enrichment and entity identification to data quality control, analytics, information retrieval and decision support. Yet the discussions at CRIS2026 also emphasised the limitations and risks associated with these technologies. A recurrent message was that technological innovation alone cannot determine the future of research information systems. AI needs to be embedded in meaningful use cases and appropriate governance frameworks, with humans remaining “at the steering wheel”. Intelligent automation may improve data quality and analytical capabilities, but transparency, accountability and informed human judgement remain essential.

A second recurrent theme was interoperability. The value of contemporary CRIS increasingly lies not in maintaining isolated institutional databases, but in their capacity to exchange, combine and contextualise information from multiple sources. Persistent identifiers, shared metadata standards and open infrastructures provide the foundations for this development. Contributions to the conference showed how information from ORCID, OpenAIRE, OpenAlex, GrantDOI and national or institutional infrastructures can be brought together and reused in CRIS, research knowledge graphs, visualisation tools and bibliometric applications. CRIS are consequently evolving from inventories of research activity towards interconnected information environments capable of supporting institutional intelligence and strategic decision-making.

This emphasis on interoperability also highlighted the growing importance of open infrastructures and open source solutions. Community-driven software, open standards and shared infrastructures offer opportunities to build more sustainable and transparent research information ecosystems. The continued development of CERIF, DSpace-CRIS and related initiatives illustrates the importance of collaborative governance models capable of responding to changing institutional requirements while maintaining interoperability and openness. At the same time, the increasing convergence between CRIS, institutional repositories and research knowledge graphs raises questions about the future architecture of scholarly information systems and the respective roles of these different components.

A further important strand concerned research evaluation. The international movement towards responsible research assessment is changing what institutions expect from their research information systems. CRIS are increasingly required to document a broader range of contributions than conventional publications and projects, including datasets, software, infrastructures, societal engagement and other research activities. They can therefore become important instruments for implementing more diverse and multidimensional approaches to research assessment. This evolution also reinforces the need for high-quality contextual information: responsible evaluation depends not only on more data, but on appropriate data models, transparent indicators and an understanding of the contexts in which research takes place.

One particularly notable feature of CRIS2026 was the prominence of research infrastructures, equipment and facilities. While this topic was explicitly addressed in the session Instruments in the Research Graph, it also appeared in several other contributions. Discussions explored how the CERIF data model and CRIS implementations could better represent research equipment and facilities - entities that have so far received less attention than publications, projects, organisations or researchers. The keynote on mapping research infrastructure from a European perspective further underlined the potential benefits of bringing the research infrastructure management and research information management communities closer together. This is likely to become an important area for further work, both within euroCRIS and in collaboration with other communities.

Finally, the diversity of national, regional and institutional case studies confirmed that there is no single model for a CRIS. Research information systems reflect different governance arrangements, policy environments, organisational cultures and levels of infrastructural maturity. Nevertheless, the cases presented at CRIS2026 also revealed a strong convergence around shared challenges: data quality, interoperability, persistent identification, sustainable governance, openness and the transformation of research data into useful knowledge. The challenge is therefore not to impose a uniform architecture but to combine local and national requirements with international interoperability.

The contributions in these proceedings

The papers collected in these proceedings provide a more permanent record of the questions, experiences and developments discussed at CRIS2026. They reflect both the diversity of the CRIS community and the changing scope of research information management. The contributions have been organised into four thematic parts, moving from the institutional, organisational and human dimensions of CRIS to emerging technologies, interoperability and open science, and finally to the integration of increasingly diverse research entities within research knowledge graphs and infrastructures.

The first part, CRIS Ecosystems, Governance and Human Factors, brings together contributions concerned with the development and operation of CRIS at national, regional and institutional levels. Case studies from Ukraine, Slovakia, France, Germany and Norway illustrate the diversity of research information ecosystems and the different paths towards coordination and integration. They address questions of governance, data validation, responsible metrics and interoperability, but also the organisational and human conditions on which successful systems depend. The Norwegian contributions, for instance, combine an account of the development of a national research information repository with a discussion of user involvement in its design. Other papers extend this human and organisational perspective by examining the emerging role of data stewards in Ukrainian universities, the ethical dimensions of research information systems, and the role of libraries in scientific information curation. Taken together, these contributions underline that CRIS are not simply technical platforms: they are socio-technical infrastructures whose quality and sustainability depend on governance, professional expertise, institutional cooperation and user engagement.

The second part, Artificial Intelligence and CRIS, addresses one of the most rapidly developing areas in research information management. The contributions range from practical applications of prompt engineering for metadata processing to the design of multilingual and predictive AI-CRIS platforms and the conceptual development of AI modules within existing research information systems. Other papers explore predictive AI for research policy, adaptive metadata generation and governed interoperability, and open-source approaches to classification. The diversity of these applications demonstrates the considerable potential of AI to support research information workflows. At the same time, the contributions raise broader questions about the reliability and transparency of automated processes, the quality of training and source data, legal and ethical compliance, and the appropriate division of responsibilities between automated tools and human expertise. This part therefore reflects a central message of CRIS2026: AI is likely to become an important component of future CRIS, but its value will depend on how meaningfully and responsibly it is embedded within research information practices.

The third part, Interoperability, Metadata and Open Science, focuses on the standards, identifiers, metadata and exchange mechanisms that enable research information to circulate between systems and communities. The papers address the integration of open science infrastructures through standards and persistent identifiers, the contribution of CRIS to FAIR and open science practices, and the automation of FAIR dataset metadata workflows. Other contributions examine open funding metadata and grant linking, the coverage and visibility of institutional research outputs in OpenAlex, synchronisation between CRIS and national CV systems, and the use of CRIS data to enhance bibliometric analysis. Together, these studies show that interoperability is no longer simply a technical requirement for exchanging records. It has become a prerequisite for connecting institutional, national and international research information environments and for enabling research information to be discovered, reused, analysed and evaluated across organisational boundaries.

The fourth part, Research Knowledge Graphs and Infrastructures, reflects an important extension of the traditional scope of CRIS. Several contributions investigate how research information systems and scholarly knowledge graphs can represent and connect entities that have historically received less attention than publications, researchers, projects and organisations. Particular emphasis is placed on research equipment, scientific instruments and facilities, with studies addressing their integration into institutional research graphs, national systems and FAIR metadata models. Other papers examine interoperability between scholarly knowledge graphs, the use of an open and flexible CRIS within distributed scientific infrastructures, the representation of scientific awards and prizes, and the integration of European research infrastructures with research knowledge graphs. These contributions illustrate how CRIS are progressively developing into richer representations of the research ecosystem, capable of connecting not only scholarly outputs and actors but also the resources, infrastructures and recognition mechanisms that enable and shape research.

Taken together, the four parts reveal several connections across what might initially appear to be distinct topics. Governance and human expertise, artificial intelligence, interoperability and research knowledge graphs are increasingly interdependent. AI applications require reliable and well-structured metadata; interoperability depends on shared standards, identifiers and governance; research knowledge graphs depend on the quality and diversity of the information supplied by institutional and national systems; and all these developments ultimately rely on people and organisations able to ensure data quality, transparency and responsible use.

The proceedings thus document a field whose boundaries are expanding. CRIS are evolving from systems primarily designed to collect, manage and report research information towards interconnected infrastructures capable of supporting open science, research assessment, institutional intelligence and increasingly complex representations of the research ecosystem. The contributions collected here do not point towards a single technological or organisational model. Rather, they demonstrate the value of combining local and national requirements with international interoperability, technological innovation with responsible governance, and increasingly powerful information systems with sustained human expertise.

From CRIS2026 to future research and development

The conference highlighted several directions for further research and development. Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly continue to transform research information workflows, but attention will increasingly need to move from technical capabilities towards questions of reliability, explainability, governance and ethical deployment. The challenge will be to identify where AI genuinely adds value while maintaining human expertise and responsibility at the centre of research information management.

Interoperability will remain another strategic priority. The growing connections between CRIS, repositories, research knowledge graphs, PID infrastructures and national and international services are progressively blurring traditional boundaries between systems. Further work on standards, semantic alignment, data provenance and sustainable governance will therefore be essential. At the same time, open science and responsible research assessment will continue to broaden the range of information managed by CRIS, including research data, software, societal contributions and other research activities.

A particularly promising direction concerns research infrastructures, equipment and scientific instruments. Their strong presence at CRIS2026 suggests that they are becoming an integral part of research information management and research knowledge graphs. Bringing the research infrastructure and CRIS communities closer together could open new opportunities for shared standards, metadata models and services.

Underlying these developments is a broader transformation: CRIS are evolving from systems primarily designed to collect and report information towards infrastructures that help create intelligence rather than simply inventory research activity. As their analytical capabilities increase, questions of data quality, transparency, trust and governance will become even more important. The future of CRIS will therefore depend on combining technological innovation with interoperability, responsible governance and sustained human expertise.

A community and its future

CRIS2026 was also an important moment for the euroCRIS community itself. The conference celebrated excellence through the inaugural Keith Jeffery Best Paper Award, established in memory of euroCRIS founder and first President Keith G. Jeffery (1947–2026). The award was presented to Pascale Dengis and Ils De Bal for Advantages and Challenges of Gathering Data into a Regional CRIS: The Case of FRIS. The Best Poster Award went to Audrey Peek for her work on the Kosovo Research Information System (KRIS). Beyond recognising outstanding contributions to CRIS2026, these awards also provided an opportunity to acknowledge Keith Jeffery's lasting contribution to euroCRIS and to the international research information community.

The editors would like to express their sincere gratitude to all authors who submitted and presented their work at CRIS2026 and, in particular, to those who prepared the papers collected in this volume. Their contributions made both the conference and these proceedings possible. We also warmly thank the members of the Programme Committee, whose careful evaluations, discussions and constructive comments ensured the scientific quality of the programme and the proceedings. Their expertise and commitment remain fundamental to the success of the CRIS conference series.

Special thanks are due to the Local Organising Committee at the Universidade dos Açores and FCCN/FCT. Their professionalism, enthusiasm and hospitality provided an excellent environment for scientific exchange and contributed greatly to making the Ponta Delgada conference a memorable event. We also acknowledge the contribution of the euroCRIS Board, the conference sponsors and partners, and the wider euroCRIS community.

CRIS2026 demonstrated that this community is simultaneously consolidating and expanding. New national and regional initiatives, international collaborations and connections with neighbouring communities show that research information management is increasingly a global endeavour. The future of CRIS will therefore depend not only on technological innovation, but also on the ability to maintain an open international community in which experience, standards and solutions can be shared.

The discussions initiated in Ponta Delgada will continue at forthcoming euroCRIS events. The next opportunity will be the Strategic Membership Meeting in Donostia–San Sebastián in autumn 2026, followed by the Spring Membership Meeting in Poznań in 2027. These meetings will provide opportunities to revisit the questions raised at CRIS2026, assess developments in a rapidly changing field and explore new forms of cooperation.

CRIS2026 ultimately captured a research information community in transition: confident in its foundations, but increasingly aware that its systems, practices and responsibilities are changing. The papers collected in this volume document the current state of this transformation while pointing towards future directions. They also reinforce a central lesson of the conference: the future of research information management will not be determined by technology alone. It will depend on the collective capacity of researchers, practitioners, institutions, infrastructures and communities to develop open, interoperable, trustworthy and human-centred research information systems that serve research and society alike.