Open Call 2017

NOTE: THE SUBMISSIONS DEADLINE FOR THIS OPEN CALL HAS PASSED. THANK-YOU FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION. 

CASRAI is issuing its inaugural annual Open Call to the international research community to support our planning of activities for the coming year.

Structure of the Call

We are calling for submissions of ideas, interest, support and engagement. There are ten (10) separate calls grouped into three (3) categories of CASRAI activities. You may be interested in responding to only one or a few of the calls below - depending on your functional area and interest. Participation is free and open to all those interested in the related topics of reducing undue administrative burden in research and improving access to and quality of research information.

  1. New standard information agreements - targeted projects aimed at developing glossaries and/or document templates that facilitate simplified information sharing between research stakeholders.
  2. New implementations or demonstrations - showcasing examples of teams and organisations around the world that are implementing CASRAI standards in their software or demonstrations of new tools using the standards.
  3. New national chapters - seeking interest from research institutions around the world to bring your national perspective and leadership to the mission of tackling the research information sharing issues in a sustainable, internationally integrated approach.

Timeline

  • Submission Period: begins September 23, 2016
  • Submission Deadline: October 31, 2016
  • Steering Committee Review Period: begins November 1, 2016
  • Resulting Standards Activities Announced: December 9, 2016
  • Resulting Standards Work Cycles: January 9 to March 31, 2017
  • Open Reviews: begin April 3, 2017

How it Works

  1. CASRAI Steering Committees and the International Secretariat jointly post an open call for submissions related to a set of priority activities (see above) for the coming year;
  2. Subject experts and other interested parties use a webform to complete short and simple submissions to those activities of interest to them by a specified deadline;
  3. CASRAI Staff and Steering Committees review and consider submissions as a final step in their consultations before scoping and resourcing activities for the coming year.

Open Access Activity

Activity: Standard Glossary and Document Templates for Open Access

Sponsored and led by the CASRAI-UK National Chapter

The intent of this form is to help organize and collect support, feedback and volunteers prior to finalising planning for this standards work. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this work. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Issue Statement

Open Access to publications is a key component of the modern research ecosystem. But the international community lacks a clear and unambiguous shared understanding of the key terminology. Several possible inputs exist but need cross reference and any gaps or confusion  should be addressed. This activity would identify a subset of open access terms that are currently causing the most confusion and, through a diverse Working Group of international subject experts, develop agreed definitions for the CASRAI dictionary.

Call Questions

Please complete the short form below to participate in this part of the open call.

 

Research Outputs\Outcomes Reporting Activity

Activity: Standard Glossary and Document Formats for Research Outputs\Outcomes Reporting

Sponsored and led by the CASRAI-UK National Chapter

The intent of this form is to help organize and collect support, feedback and volunteers prior to finalising planning for this standards work. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this work. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Issue Statement

The efficiency and effectiveness of outputs and outcomes reporting to UK research funders could be improved in a number of ways. Researchers are suffering greater levels of administrative burden through duplication in the systems they must use to report their research outputs. Research institutions and funders are frustrated by the inconsistent quality of information. This activity will take a first step toward solving some of these issue by way of standard information agreements between research institutions and research funders for reporting research outputs and outcomes. The goal will be to identify a subset of priority output types (going beyond publications) and to develop standard terms and exchange templates.

Call Questions

Please complete the short form below to participate in this part of the open call.

 

Career Levels Activity

Activity: Standard Glossary and Taxonomy for Academic Career Levels

Sponsored and led by the CASRAI-UK National Chapter

The intent of this form is to help organize and collect support, feedback and volunteers prior to finalising planning for this standards work. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this work. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Issue Statement

The CASRAI-UK community has identified a number of issues related to the lack of an accurate and consistent way to classify researchers and scholars by the stage they are at in their career. There is fragmentation in this level of information - across research institutions, research funders, disciplines and countries. In short, how does the community denote ‘research age’? This classification is needed in multiple stages of research information collection: eligibility for funding opportunities, Athena Swan and the Race and Equality Charter Mark. This activity will look at what definitions are currently in place in the UK context to start (REF, ECR, HESA categories, etc.) and what commonalities exist across these contexts.them? The goal will be to produce a first-draft standard agreed taxonomy.

Call Questions

Please complete the short form below to participate in this part of the open call.

 

IRIDIUM Glossary

Activity: Standard Glossary for Research Data Management (IRIDIUM)

Sponsored and led in partnership with CODATA, Research Data Canada (other national services welcome)

The intent of this form is to help organize and collect support, feedback and volunteers prior to finalizing planning for this standards work. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this work. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Issue Statement

Improvement of research data management is a rapidly developing field that is increasingly recognized as a key element in advancing research and innovation in government, academic, and private sectors. A major difficulty in any newly emerging field is the lack of consistent terminology and precise, definitive definitions of these terms. Such a complex endeavour involving people and technologies from different fields, and transcending each of those fields, requires a standardization and harmonization of terms and definitions used. Currently, there is no formal international standard for terminology in the field of research data management, although some standards contain some relevant terms. In the meantime, there is a pressing need for a common, practical vocabulary. The aim of this activity is to advance a stable and sustainably governed international glossary of community accepted terms and definitions, and to keep it relevant by maintaining it as a ‘living reference’ that is updated as necessary.

Call Questions

Please complete the short form below to participate in this part of the open call.

 

New Standards

Activity: Call for New Standards Proposals from the Community

Sponsored and led by the Board of Directors and the Secretariat

The intent of this form is to capture ideas for new standard information agreements that you feel are important but ARE NOT COVERED in this call. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this work. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Call Purpose

The other components in this 2017 Open Call reflect the priorities that the Canadian and United Kingdom national chapters have identified through consultations. You may have a specific research information challenge that you don't see covered in these proposed priorities. Also, you may have reviewed or adopted one of the CASRAI standards and would like to propose changes or enhancements to it. Please use the form below to bring these ideas to the attention of the chapter Steering Committees. Your ideas will be included in the next planning cycle and, depending on community interest, will become a part of the next Open Call.

Call Questions

Please complete the short form below to participate in this part of the open call.

 

Funding Awards Pilot

Activity: Pilot Implementation of Standard Funding Awards Announcements by Funders

Sponsored and led by the CASRAI-CA National Chapter

The intent of this form is to help organize and collect support, feedback and volunteers prior to finalising planning for this standards work. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this work. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Issue Statement

Like most institutions, the University of Toronto tracks the success of its applications in a research information database. Accurately tracking the approximately 3500 applications submitted by U of T investigators each year and setting up new accounts is both time sensitive and time consuming. As everyone who has worked in a research office knows, the pressure to provide instantaneous analysis for major competitions and access to new accounts is enormous. With approximately 3500 applications every year this is no small feat for an institution like the U of T. Looking at the two year period April 1, 2009 to March 31, 2011, of the 652 unique sponsors to which applications were submitted by University researchers, only 7 sponsors received in excess of 100 applications in a year from the University. Unfortunately not all these sponsors provide competition results in an electronic format to the University, and of the sponsors that do, not all provide results for all programs in a format that is amenable to an automatic upload of results. Nonetheless, even with these restrictions in mind, it was determined that between 25% and 50% of the results which the University receives could eventually be handled by automatic upload. Using conservative estimates of the amount of time taken to manually update results in the system and set up new accounts, this would translate into a potential annual time saving for research office staff of 218 hours at the low end, to 436 hours at the high end, or approximately 6 to 12 weeks of savings overall. This activity will pilot the automatic publishing of research awards by funders in a CASRAI-standard format (CRIS-X, see below activity) to enable research institutions to automatically upload these awards into their local systems.

Call Questions

Please complete the short form below to participate in this part of the open call.

 

ORCID in Canada

Activity: New ORCID Consortium in Canada

Sponsored and led by the CASRAI-CA National Chapter, CRKN, RDC and CARL

The intent of this form is to help organize and collect support, feedback and volunteers prior to finalising planning for this standards work. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this work. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Issue Statement

The ORCID system is a successful international implementation of CASRAI standard terms. This activity will work to implement an ORCID Consortia in Canada. As part of it’s Admin Burden in Canada (ABC) initiative the Canadian National Chapter of CASRAI is helping coordinate the implementation. Recent workshops held in Toronto and Ottawa meeting culminated with a discussion that highlighted significant interest in forming ORCID-CA. The discussion led to the recommendation to expand the existing exploratory Working Group to determine further community interest, articulate value, and begin crafting a plan to move a Canadian consortium forward. A number of mostly member-based nonprofit organizations that could speak for a broad community of stakeholders were identified. These organizations agreed to continue the Working Group activities and to expand the group to include those organizations expressing interest in joining and to liaise with the Canadian federal research funding agencies going forward. In order to move ahead, a group of representatives from a subset of this list met on May 27th to draft a summary of the meetings and an invitation letter to be sent to representatives from each of the listed organizations, asking for interest in contributing to the ORCID-CA Working Group. The goal of the Working Group is to identify a path for a consortium to take form so it should be noted that opportunities for membership, governance and other inputs around the initiative remain fully open.

Call Questions

The form for this call component is being hosted by the ORCID Implementation Group. If you are interested in staying informed about the development of the ORCID consortium in Canada, or actively participating in this development, please fill out the individual Expression of Interest Form. If your institution may be interested in becoming a member of the consortium, and you are able to drive this at your institution, please fill out the institutions Expression of Interest Form.

 

CRIS-X Exchange Format

Activity: CRIS-X XML Data Exchange Format Standard

Sponsored and led by the CASRAI-CA National Chapter

The intent of this form is to help organize and collect support, feedback and volunteers prior to finalising planning for this standards work. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this work. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Issue Statement

In order to facilitate the implementation of CASRAI-compliant research information exchanges between stakeholders, e.g. a funding agency and a university, a suitable data standard that enables data exchange between information systems is needed. This would save implementers having to craft their own or each learn a different format for supporting CASRAI exchanges. XML and JSON are common choices for enterprise to enterprise computing. We have chosen to start with XML in the CRIS-X format until JSON toolsets and validators are more mainstream. We anticipate developing a CRIS-J format when the tools and community demand make this feasible. We have held back releasing this new format for community adoption and evolution while we explored whether the CERIF-XML format would be suited to CASRAI exchanges. We have since found that CERIF-XML is not an ideal fit and so we are launching CRIS-X to suit the needs of CASRAI research information exchanges. We understand EuroCRIS (a CASRAI partner) is exploring a new version of CERIF-XML and we will actively monitor their progress. In the meantime there is a need, and room for, two nonprofit-governed XML standard exchange formats for research information.

Call Questions

Please complete the short form below to participate in this part of the open call.

 

Implementation Stories

Activity: Promoting Implementation Stories

Sponsored and led by the CASRAI Board and Secretariat

The intent of this form is to collect your stories of implementing CASRAI standards so we can organize webinars and other promotional activities to showcase your work. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this effort. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Call for Stories

CASRAI standard information agreements are intended to help solve the related problems of (a) growing administrative burden on researchers and their institutions and (b) the quality and accessibility of research information. In order for these benefits to accrue to the research community the standard agreements must be adopted and implemented in local software systems, databases and portals. The purpose of this segment of the Open Call is to gather your implementation stories and actively promote them.

If your organization has implemented a CASRAI Standard Information Agreement please complete the short form below. We want to promote your implementation and experience and use it to help others who are planning implementations. CASRAI will publish your stories and will coordinate a series of free and open webinars to showcase your work. As an example, the CASRAI CRediT standard information agreement on classifying contributions made to research outputs is gaining momentum in article submission systems and workflows at scholarly publishers.

Call Questions

Please complete the short form below to participate in this part of the open call.

 

New National Chapters

Activity: Start a New National CASRAI Chapter in Your Country

Sponsored and led by the CASRAI Board and Secretariat

The intent of this form is to help organize and collect volunteers and expressions of interest for starting a new national CASRAI chapter in your country. Your participation in this outreach process will contribute to the success of this effort. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Call to Action

The CASRAI mission is to adapt the principles and best practices of open standards and data governance to lead and facilitate key stakeholders in annual deliberations to develop ‘standard information agreements’ that serve as bridges between research information users. CASRAI agreements cover all the key information requirements that relate to the management of research throughout its life cycle. This includes information requirements related to applications for funds, CVs, project and funds management, compliance requirements, reporting as well as research data management and scholarly communications. Our vision is for all stakeholders (institutions, funders, publishers and software providers) to adopt the resulting ‘invisible infrastructure’ in their local software and processes so we can collectively enable stable, predictable and comparable results when sharing research information throughout the life cycle.

Research Information (about Researchers, Organisations, Projects, Equipment, etc) is collected and managed at the local level by researchers and their institutions. The structure and requirements for that research information are strongly impacted by the governments and other funding sources in your country.

The purpose of a national chapter of CASRAI in your country is to (a) organize research institutions to constructively influence those national requirements, (b) ensure the feasibility and efficiency of collecting the information in local systems and (c) bring your national institutional perspective to the wider international CASRAI efforts towards standardization. CASRAI is organized via these national chapters. These national chapters are led by research institutions in each country.

Please join your colleagues in the national research communities in Canada and in the United Kingdom and reach out to us to start your own chapter - all it takes is one leading institution in your country to get things started.

Call Questions

Please complete the short form below to participate in this part of the open call.

 
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