The Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI) improves the flow of information within and between research stakeholders by developing and maintaining standard information agreements among various stakeholders in the research enterprise.
The DuraSpace organization and CASRAI are pleased to announce that CASRAI is now a project of DuraSpace. Together they will work to enable CASRAI in becoming a sustainable, community-driven project; on continuing to develop new community-based standards; and on expanding the CASRAI community beyond the over 50 organizations currently engaged with the project.
The CASRAI community has developed the CASRAI standard dictionary of research administration information to facilitate controlled information exchanges between stakeholders enabling collaborative teams to work across academic research, clinical, and applied domains.
The dictionary is shared infrastructure meant to serve as a key component of the national and international interoperability strategies of research organizations. It represents the integrated outputs (and ongoing maintenance) of an international network of subject matter experts from stakeholder organizations. The dictionary is intended as a canonical collection of common terms and their descriptors as well as basic structural groupings.
For more information about CASRAI, please visit: casrai.org
Speaking for a long-time member of the CASRAI community, Dr Simon Kerridge, Director of Research Services at the University of Kent and CASRAI Chair said, “I strongly support CASRAI’s alliance with DuraSpace. It ensures the sustainability of the CASRAI effort, and it signals the growing maturity of this exciting collaborative enterprise. But most important, the connection with DuraSpace will drive innovation that research offices, libraries, and other campus services concerned with knowledge and research information management can offer their communities.”
Connecting CASRAI with the DuraSpace Community
Recognizing the complementarities and synergies within the international open ecosystem the addition of the CASRAI project marks a broadening of the DuraSpace mandate in two key ways. First, we are adding ‘open systems’ and ‘open standards’ to our current focus on ‘open source’ – a layered open stack we will be calling OS3 or “OS-cubed”. Second, we are adding a Research Management Information (RMI) dimension to our scholarly communications and open access program areas and we are excited to have the CASRAI project spearhead our new Research Management Information (RMI) efforts.
By taking advantage of DuraSpace support services that include executive leadership, technical leadership, community outreach, communications, business development, and administration,(https://duraspace.org/about/what-we-do/projects/) projects minimize administrative costs while connecting with well-established open source development communities. CASRAI and DuraSpace began efforts towards establishing CASRAI as a formal project in January 2018.