CRIS and SORA

The CRIS (Current Research Information System), which uses a Symplectic software called Elements, is a flexible, easy-to-use system designed to make publications management a straightforward process for both academics and managers. It is also designed to meet the needs of research quality exercises, such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

The CRIS is a closed system that is accessible only to St George’s staff and researchers. Researchers can upload full text of their research publications in the CRIS, and these will made accessible on SORA after library staff check copyright terms and conditions. Guides are available via the help tab in the CRIS (login required).

SORA (St George's Online Research Archive) is St George’s open access institutional repository. Where copyright permits, it makes freely available publications written by researchers at St George’s. SORA uses software called Eprints. This is an open source software used by a number of institutions for their repositories. CoSector hosts and develops SORA on behalf of St George’s.

There is policy and guidance available for those using CRIS and SORA.

The Open Access Publications policy gives St George’s, University of London researchers a summary of what they need to know to ensure that their authorship, affiliation and funders are identified in publications; about recording their publications in CRIS; and about making their publications available on open access.

The SORA licence outlines the terms and conditions under which researchers deposit their work.

The SORA guidance on inclusion and take-down policy outlines what type of data and content are held in SORA, how it is maintained, and how to contact us about any issues relating to content made available via SORA.

St George’s researchers can upload papers onto the record for the publication in CRIS, and by confirming they agree to deposit in the upload process, the full text files will be transferred into a review of area of SORA. After this, St George’s repository team will check the copyright status before making the record publicly accessible, taking every step to ensure that breaches of copyright do not occur.

If it is not possible to deposit full-text versions we will contact you to advise you further on this. A record of the bibliographic information only may be made available via SORA, linking to the content in a subject repository, or the home page of the journal or publisher website. The article's DOI (digital object identifier), where available, will be included on SORA records, ensuring the published version of record is clearly identified to users.

Guidance on how to upload is available via the help tab in the CRIS (login required).

St George’s authors are encouraged to deposit the final, post-refereed version. This is the version of the paper created by the author and incorporating any revisions required as a result of peer review.

This will ensure your work is closely associated with the publication containing the published version, and when uploaded within three months of the date of acceptance, is in line with eligibility requirements for REF 2021.

Full text publications placed in the repository are subject to copyright law. Typesetting and layout of the article in a publisher's PDF is regarded as 'value added' by many publishers, and consequently they are unwilling to allow the use of their PDF in SORA, unless the terms and conditions of publication allow this (for example, if the work is published under a Creative Commons license). For more information please see the open access FAQs or the library blog post Confused about Creative Commons licences?

Having a record of your research in the CRIS as well as SORA provides a number of benefits. It will:

• meet the requirements of major research funding bodies for publicly-funded research and endorse the principles of open access publishing.
• help to increase the visibility and impact of research publications produced by staff employed by St George’s, University of London. All material in the repository is crawled by Google.
• ensure that research outputs are prepared and displayed in a way which helps maximise the value that they have for St George’s both internally and externally.
• ensure that the organisation of published outputs will also demonstrably benefit the researcher in terms of personal record keeping, visibility of research and administrative effort.

For CRIS information and guidance, such as user guides, please login to your CRIS profile and click on the help tab at the top right-hand side.

The library offers training on how to use the CRIS. To book an appointment, or for any questions you have about the CRIS and SORA, please e-mail the St George’s repository team.