While these two kinds of systems were once seen as competing with each other, nowadays they tend to work together via efficient mechanisms for information exchange around research outputs and their associated metadata.
[11] Besides highlighting the key influence of national-level research assessment exercises on the availability of CRIS systems in a country, the report states the intention of their authors to carry out regular updates for the survey in order to examine the landscape evolution in a number of areas.
As mentioned in the “Practices and Patterns” report, research assessment is one of the key drivers for the implementations of CRIS systems, especially at research-performing organisations.
Among many others, this involves aspects such as: Where available, CRIS systems are often key components in the Open Science implementation strategy at research-performing organisations[15] due to their systematic use for collecting information on all research outputs produced at institutions.
Their comprehensive aggregation of contextual research information makes CRISs very suitable tools for extracting business intelligence indicators for decision-making purposes at institutions and beyond.
Emerging areas of work like the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) in the UK[16] provide further practical applications for these systems.