Grete Christina Lingjærde and Andora Sjøgren

USIT, University of Oslo

The research documentation system Frida (Research results, information and documentation of scientific activities )

• System overview

• The need for information

• The Norwegian financial model and the Itar-system

• Quality mechanisms

• Frida and reuse of data

• Frida – a future national research documentation system

Topics

• Frida is an integrated research environment for the documentation and presentation of research activities, research results and scientific competence.

• Data from Frida is used to generate statistics for research activities at Norwegian universities. Information provided by this system plays a major role in the annual funding of universities by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.

• Therefore, data quality has been a major issue in the development of

the system.

What does Frida provide

• a unified view of researchers, research projects and research production at all the organization levels to the institution

• a flexible and distributed model for registration and validation of data where researchers have full insight in and control over their own data

• direct import of research publications from ISI and Norart makes registration less time-consuming

• a system suitable for internal presentation and external profiling of research groups, research centers, departments, etc

• a system that satisfies the government’s demands for documentation of research production

Information needs that Frida has to cover

Internal needs• Internal division/distribution of assets• Presentation/overview of scientific activities• Information for developing an institutional strategy for Research

Activities

Government• Reports to DBH on aggregated level

Financial Model• Research activities are a part of the basis for the grants/funds given to the

universities

Profiling of researchers and research activities

The five modules of Frida

• Research results• Projects• Scientists• Research units • Annual reporting

Research results

Presentation/overview of scientific work and activities:

• Journal publications • Books • Reports• Chapters in books/reports• Talks• Posters• Media contributions• Exhibitions • Artistic work • Products• Patents

Project catalog

Overview of projects with information about title, description, url, picture, etc.

Project can be connected with central information objects in Frida, such as:

• persons• organization units• research results, for example

publications, talks, reports• search words • other projects

Scientists (the catalog of expertise )

Presentation/ overview of scientists and

research competence:

• Brief description of research units and persons, in terms of searchable keywords

• Can easily identify persons and units with competence

in a particular scientific field

• Can easily obtain an overall picture of the competence of given persons or units

Research units

Overview of Research Groups, Research centers and organizational units with information about name, description, url, picture, etc.

The Research groups centers, units etc, can be connected with central information objects in Frida, such as: • persons• organization units• research results, for example

publications, talks, reports• search words • projects• other Research groups, centers

Research group

Organizational unit

Research Centers

Annual reporting

Additional information related toresearch activities, e.g.

• annual workload• sabbaticals/research leaves abroad• visitors• awards, prizes and honors

Information on two levels:• concerning an individual• concerning a scientific unit

Full-text databases

All universities which are using Frida today also use open archives to store their publication in full text, also called open Access-databases:

• DIVA, BORA, DUO, Munin

Scientific full text documents can be delivered to Frida:

• Metadata (title, authors, etc) are registered in Frida

• The full text documents with the metadata are transferred to the open archive of the respective university

NORA: is the organization of the Norwegian Open Research Archives.

Data model and the authoritative registers

The system contains registers/separate tables of:• periodicals, series• publishers • organizations (institutions) • common code tables.

Frida institutions share these registers. The common use andmaintenance of these registers is an important quality measure in Frida.

Control of data in the database

• Much of the information in Frida is subject to automatic validation in the database. Tables with code values are implemented in many areas. For example, there is a central code table for publication type. All legal values that the user may register in a field must be represented in the corresponding code tables. In addition, various business rules are implemented in the database.

• These rules prevent the direct alteration of data in the database (or via the web interface) that might introduce inconsistencies or otherwise lead to poor quality. For example, the user cannot register a journal that does not have an ISSN.

• Furthermore, only authors registered with a social security number will be recognized by the system as affiliated with the institution (confirmation of author address).

Duplicate control

• Standard duplicate controls used in bibliographic data systems have been implemented in Frida.

• Due to the strict and normalized database structure, other approaches and controls have also been implemented. The common use of authoritative registers makes duplicate control functions easier to implement.

Data registration and alternation of data

• Only authorized users can log on and enter or change data in the system. Only authors of a publication can alter the data concerning this publication.

• Super users within the same line of organization can also make changes to the data. For example, the super user at the Department of Mathematics may perform alterations to publication records involving authors working at this particular department.

• It is also possible for the institution to activate an email-messaging system that notifies all the authors involved whenever a change has been made to a publication record or a new publication is being registered.

A new financial model

The Norwegian documentation system for research funding was approved by the Ministry of Education and Research in 2005, and the model was applied for the first time during budget allocations in 2006.

The system is designed to facilitate a performance-based distribution of research funding to institutions based on factors including academic publishing activity.

Central initiatives

The Ministry of Education and Research took initiative to

improve the quality of publication data. This resulted in:

• (1) The creation of a national register of publication channels (periodicals, series, publishers) and institutions (organizations).

• (2) An information pool of bibliographic data to be distributed

to local research documentation systems.

• A system called ITAR (Import Service and Authority Registers) was developed in order to organize information from authoritative registers and bibliographic data. These data are made available to Frida via an export service in ITAR. Suppliers of bibliographic data: ISI, Norart and BIBSYS.

Data from external bibliographical data sources

An import component has been developed in the Frida-application which allows academic staff to import their own publications as well as allowing administrative staff to import all publications for their institution.

The import component in Frida has been designed to handle the different statuses a publication may have:

• The import publication has already been manually registered• The import publication has already been imported but lacks additional data • The import publication is new (has not been previously registered in Frida)

During the import phase, a selection of ITAR-data is defined as authoritative and will override manually registered data. This is particularly relevant for data later submitted when applying for funding from the Ministry of Education and Research, including publication channel, the number of authors and the publication type (article, letter etc.). These data can not be changed by the user. Other data such as title and volume can be changed.

Frida as an economy system

Information provided by Frida on scientific activities play a

role in annual funding of the universities from the ministry of

education in Norway. Therefore the system is treated as

an economy system with the following demands:

• Quality routines must exist and must be followed• Tracability, change control, who, when etc , ? • Controls and businessrules are implemented in the system

Quality mechanisms

• Import of data from ITAR (quality assured by NSD)

• Authority registers (from ITAR)

• Other code tables

• Business rules implemented in the database

• Import of authors employed by the institution from the institution HR

system

• Data in Frida is made available though an open Web interface. This also

improve the quality of data. Scientists do not want incorrect information

about them published on the web.

Quality mechanisms

Quality routines• Description of all phases from data entry, data control and approval to the

annual reporting of data

• The Frida Secretariat has provided a common routine description to its member institutions

Approval regime

• All publications that are candidates for reporting have to be approved by a super user or other administrative staff before they are reported to the Ministry of Education and Research

Quality reports• Several reports have been developed as part of the quality assurance process.

Several reports have been developed as part of the quality assurance process. Cross institutional rapport easy to make due to VPD

Reuse of Frida data• We allow reuse of Frida data in different contexts, It is also possible to save the

results of a publication query to an XML tagged file. These data can be used in e.g. CVs or funding applications.

• An important issue, both for the general acceptance of the system and for the prevention of inconsistencies in the registered data, is the need to safeguard against the registration of the same information multiple times.

• There is also an increasing demand for the use of data from Frida in other contexts, both locally and publicly. The number of stakeholders are increasing, such as students, the researchers themselves, research managers, administrators, journalists, foundations, companies and the general public.

• Submit service which allows the submission of journal papers and other contents

to Open Access Systems.

• For researchers to report data to their institution, they should only have to relate to one system: Frida.

Reuse of Frida data It is possible to reuse Frida data in different context for example in local Web-pages by dynamic links

Export of data from Frida

An XML-Schema has been made for the Frida publication data.

With the help of the predefined XML-Schema research results can be exported from Frida and imported to a local webpage.

Frida as a national system

A national group was established in 2008 to look at the possibility of establishing a common national system (also including all the research institutes and Health Trust /hospitals) in Norway. The group recommended that a restructured Frida was the best solution, and the Ministry of Education and Research decided in 2009 that Frida would be the common research system in Norway for 150 institutions.

Frida as a national system

The main purpose of the restructuring was to make more of the data shared / common between the institutions while still allowing for the institutional view, ownership and responsibility of the data. By this restructuring , the system will simultaneously satisfy both institutional and national needs.

Current Research System in Norway

Benefits of restructuring Frida

• No need to make a separate view/presentation of data for a national presentation

• The number of duplicates will be reduced, especially in a national perspective

• Data is more suited for statistics and data-warehousing for advanced sophisticated analysis of data

• Reuse of what is already implemented in Frida makes restructuring possible at reduced costs

Benefits of restructuring Frida

• Common data is not duplicated in the institutional databases

• Disjoint and private data are stored in the institutionally specific areas/database.

• The institutionally specific view, ownership and control of are retained

• Rationalization. Closing similar systems and focusing on one system will benefit more users and stakeholders.

Conclusion• The quality of Frida is always on the agenda, and the system is constantly being

improved. The total number of publication points reported to the Ministry of Education and Research over the last two years has stabilized. We interpret this as an indication that the level of quality is acceptable.

• There is a great interest from researchers to register data. Researchers are only required to register data that is reported to the Ministry, but many researchers register data about all their activities. Researchers demand that the data registered in Frida can be used for profiling them as researchers. Introducing VPD resulted in an opportunity to develop national control routines across all participating Frida institutions.

• Frida was an excellent starting point for a national system for registering research activities. When Frida is restructured, and is offered to all research institutions in Norway, it will be introduced with a new name Cristin!

• Cristin will be launched at the end of year 2010.