CASRAI has issued its first annual Open Call to gather feedback, ideas and implementation stories, and I very much hope you will participate. You do not need to be a member of CASRAI as it is free and open to all. The submission deadline is October 31, 2016.
CASRAI is a non-profit consortia of institutional Research Offices and Research Libraries working collectively with their government and commercial partners to solve one key part of the global interoperability challenge – the development of ‘standard information exchange agreements’. We do this by working with the business (i.e., non-technology) functional units at research institutions and by using methods that combine data governance and open standards practices. CASRAI standards differ from technology standards in that they are agreements on terms, basic record structures, and document templates – essentially, ‘business information requirements’. The CASRAI vision is for all stakeholders (institutions, funders, publishers and software providers) to adopt these standardized and harmonized information requirements in their local software and processes, so that we can, with minimal overhead or coordination, collectively enable stable, predictable and comparable results when sharing information throughout the research lifecycle.
The purpose of our open call is to gather input from the global research community as CASRAI Steering Groups plan their activities for the coming year. There are three types of annualized activities at CASRAI:
New standard information agreements – targeted projects aimed at developing new (or revising existing) glossaries and/or document templates that facilitate simplified information sharing between research stakeholders;
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; also showcasing new technologies for simplifying interoperability via CASRAI standards;
New national chapters – seeking interest from research institutional leaders around the world to bring their national perspective and leadership to the mission of tackling the research information sharing issues in a sustainable, internationally integrated approach.
We hope you will participate in our general call – it only takes a few moments and you can respond to only those components of interest to your organisation. We specifically hope that the ORCID community will respond to the call for new ideas (https://casrai.org/opencall17/ideas) and submit your thoughts on gaps or improvements you see as needed in describing research and scholarly works. Watch for reports from CASRAI on the results of the open call and the ideas submitted that touch on these and other topics of particular interest to the ORCID community.
Again, the deadline to get your feedback in is October 31, 2016. We hope you will get involved!