Regional Portal UnityFVG: interoperability through DSpace-CRIS and open standards

Friuli-VeneziaGiulia (FVG) "Regional Scientific System" includes three Public Research Institutions, three Universities, four International Institutions, four Technological parks in FVG region in North-East Italy. In 2014 the three Universities started to cooperate for a common research output inside a project named UnityFVG: UnitedUniversities-FVG. They already have 10 years experience in OA with four Institutional Repositories (DSpace/DSpace-CRIS based) and more than 100,000 Research Publications. So they decided to provide a single point of access under a new Regional Research Portal based on DSpace-CRIS. The project, with the technical support of Cineca consortium, offers a great opportunity to improve the interoperability of DSpace-CRIS based solutions. The European standard for the research domain, CERIF, is the best option to drive rich information to the portal in a standard and reusable way. A plugin/patch for DSpace will be freely available to enable data export using CERIF-XML over OAI-PMH. CERIF-XML will be available for all the main entities (People, Projects, Organizations, Journals, Conferences, Dataset, Publications and metrics). The DSpace OAI-PMH harvester will be extended to support ingestion of complex, interconnected information as provided by the CERIF-XML format. This will enable content replication between DSpace-CRIS instances and easy setup of public OA oriented portals.