KI’s requirements of a Research Information Management System 

The requirements document KI has set for the procurement of a Research Information Management System (RIMS) includes some 100 specific requirements. About half of them are mandatory requirements and the other half is labeled “Should”. Below is a summarized description. 

Information about ongoing research  

  • RIMS will be the place to go for information about researchers, research projects and research groups, but with other systems being master for parts of the information.  
  • RIMS will be the place to view and manage information about funding, projects, contracts and formations and their in-between relations. This information will, where possible, be imported from the KI systems where it resides today.  

Information about completed research  

  • RIMS will continuously retrieve information about research output from data sources inside and outside KI. Users will also be able to add publications or other research outputs to the RIMS, in case they do not exist in any of the systems that we import outputs from.  
  • RIMS will work in close collaboration (integration) with KI’s bibliometric system. 

Researchers and formations  

  • Our research groups, networks and other temporary (non-organizational) formations must be able to easily display and edit information about themselves.  
  • It should be easy to create CV:s and profile pages based on ones own publications and other output.  

Search, display, analysis and reporting  

  • It shall be easy to search and find people and resources within a given domain. 
  • It shall be easy to generate reports, either predefined or generated from search results.  
  • KI shall have the possibility to create dashboards for internal and/or public use. 

General functions 

  • Compliance with EU regulations incl GDPR. 
  • Possibility to display the information according to sensitivity/settings (e.g. public, internal, or restricted to the information owner). 
  • Searching and classifying research information with both controlled vocabularies (e.g. MeSH) and free subject headings. 
  • Validation workflows for several types of information, to ensure that imported or retrieved information is correct and that a researcher can choose visibility level for the information (internal, external, hidden). 

Other requirements  

We demand that the supplier establishes transparent processes for the following areas:  

  • Educational resources for continuous training and onboarding. 
  • Prioritization of development of new functionalities – how do they involve customers?  
  • Incident management and change/release management. 

We also require that the RIMS shall interact with our current systems in a seamless way:  

  • Integrations with existing systems at KI via KI Integrations Platform in order to automatically reuse as much information as possible and to minimize manual input. (Examples of these integrations: HR/Primula has information about research groups, UBW holds financial information and agreements etc.) 
  • Support for SSO (Single Sign On) via SAML2 for a convenient log in procedure using KI-id.