The CatRIS project aimed at developing a European wide catalogue of services for Research Infrastructures. It was funded by the European Union (GA 824173) and coordinated by the European Science Foundation. Active since January 2019, the project concluded last June 2021.
As key result, the CatRIS consortium developed an open, trusted and user-friendly portal to a harmonised and aggregated Catalogue of Research Infrastructure Services offered at European and National levels. It supports and it is interoperable with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Catalogue, focusing on Physical Research Infrastructures (RIs), Core Facilities (CFs) and Shared Scientific Resources (SSR); the portal also makes the information findable and accessible by researchers, research groups, communities, projects, organisations, innovators and businesses, funders and policy makers.
The catalogue was developed as a user tailored portal, designed for user needs and beneficial for service providers. The project followed a bottom-up approach, with early involvement of service providers themselves for its design.
CatRIS Portal has today in its catalogue about 610 Onboarded services by 132 Providers and it can offer:
- A ready-to-use available platform for showcasing research infrastructure services
- Expertise in cataloguing services across all fields of research
- Network of services providers and good practices for services descriptions, including services offered by different providers
- Access to technical expertise and onboarding support, helping them to attract potential users from both academia and industryand enhancing collaboration and networking
- Showcasing of services in an EOSC-compatible form
CatRIS committed in engaging with stakeholders at an early stage, to gather insights on typology of research infrastructures’ services. In this direction, EFIS Centre led the activity broad-based consultation and needs elicitation process, aimed at gathering insights from stakeholders’ experts. The outcome of these consultations supported the significant conceptual, technical and ontological developments towards the development of coherent database structure and the definition of the related functionalities, classifications, user interfaces, etc.
Additionally, a continuous interaction with the community of reference has been maintained to guide the project development and keep it in line with the stakeholder’s needs. Indeed, EFIS also covered a key role in stakeholders’ outreach and engagement, in the context of the work package on Communication, dissemination and exploitation activities.
At the event “Increasing your services’ visibility and impact through the CatRIS portal“, held on the 11th of March 2021 with about 70 participants, CatRIS partners announced and showcased the full operability of the CatRIS Portal and provided an overview of a tool aiming at increasing the visibility of Research Services from any field of science while enhancing accessibility, usage and impact. CatRIS functionalities and benefits have been presented, and two Service Providers have shared their experience with the CatRIS Portal and their expected benefits.
Finally, CatRIS Portal will remain active as we will be striving to make CatRIS a sustainable resource for the RI community and the European Research Area. Some of the exploitable results and benefits of the project include softwares, data models, ontologies and classifications, onboarding processes and methodologies, user engagement and support, data, networks and partnerships.
More information about the project:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/catris/
Twitter: @project_catris
CatRIS videos: https://project.catris.eu/multimedia
