CERN Scientific Information Landscape Project: Project Overview and Identified Needs: Summary of findings during Milestones 1 and 2

Scientific information is the key output of CERN’s activities. Consequently, the efficient management, preservation and dissemination of information is a core activity of the Organization. Scientific information undergoes a natural lifecycle: from its creation, through dissemination and management, to finally being discoverable and reusable for further scientific studies. Due to CERN‘s historically grown, fragmented and non-interoperable landscape of numerous information management tools and services, the creation, management, reuse and discoverability of CERN’s scientific information is not possible today without significant human efforts and manual workarounds. Given the importance of these activities for CERN, a project was launched by the Director for Research and Computing in order to investigate the status quo, highlight concrete shortcomings, and develop a proposal for a holistic information management landscape for CERN’s research products. Based on this mandate, the CERN Scientific Information Service launched an extensive study of the as-is situation of CERN’s information management. Observations from a series of stakeholder interviews within the CERN research community but also authors of scientific information across all departments, a survey amongst creators and consumers of scientific information, and from its direct observations in the day-to-day management of research outputs were compared with today’s best practices in scientific information management in order to identify key gaps and weaknesses at CERN. The identified weaknesses in the status quo of CERN’s suite of scientific information management systems can be mitigated or corrected through a number of recommendations developed by the project team of SIS. All recommendations together will result in the development of a holistic and efficient information management landscape for CERN, including a) a new central workflow management to support the creation, approval and dissemination of research products; b) a new streamlined institutional repository focusing on the preservation and dissemination of scientific artefacts, accompanied by existing repository solutions such as EDMS, HEPData and Zenodo; and eventually c) a Current Research Information System (CRIS) including a federated search functionality for scientific information (if a further analysis confirms a sufficiently strong added value over existing third party solutions). The implementation of such a new landscape needs to be supported by an organisation-wide training and education programme. The proposed improvements and new developments will not only significantly improve the efficiency of the entire scientific information lifecycle across all CERN departments and experiments, it will also lead to better visibility and discoverability of CERN research, will allow CERN to showcase its impact on society more prominently, and will ensure the adequate long-term preservation of CERN research products. As such, implementing the proposed measures should be seen as a key strategic initiative of the Organization in the coming years.