Friday, September 17, 2010

Help - I'm in acronym hell ...... CRIS, RIS, or RMS?

Just went to update my recent post - to use 'RMS' (Research Management System) rather than 'RIS' (Research Information System).

Then I had a brief look at various websites ..... which made me think that the wider community (ie JISC/standards/euro-Uni community) has adopted 'CRIS' (Current Research Information System....... why the 'c'?).

I think, since we're often referring to 'Symplectic Elements', 'RMS' makes more sense to me/our project, or perhaps it should be 'Next Generation Publications Database' (Pub DB v2.0)...... I think because I see Symplectic Elements as being a subset of a RIS/CRIS functionality - it currently helps to manage the publications part of 'research information' and not all the other information created, or which needs to be managed at other stages of the research lifecycle.

Anyway, now I'm thinking of changing every reference on our blogs to 'CRIS' - perhaps we should standardise on that even though 'Current Research Information System' doesn't really fit with Symplectic Elements/Symplectic repository tools.

aarrgh

Bo Middleton (University of Leeds)

1 comment:

  1. An age-old problem guaranteed to have you tied in knots this one Bo. See the 'c' could also stand for 'central' since historically some institutions have had well-organised departments that kept all of this information to themselves, only sharing it when begged on bended knee. With institutions attempting to 'centralise' information, this is probably where the other 'c' comes from.

    Strangely, Lizzie D and I were discussing the very same thing after the last meeting, with the consensus that we are also somewhat confused as to the differences between the various systems and what elements have to exist to be one rather than the other.

    Richard J had a definite view on this... perhaps he could clarify his thoughts?

    We call our centralised research management 'thingy' a RMS but I'd be interested to hear what others think.

    Sarah Molloy (Queen Mary)

    ReplyDelete