Many of our new PhD-candidates, post docs and employees come from other countries are probably not familiar with the system used at HVL and other Norwegian research and higher education institutions for registrering research publications and activities. Therefore; to all our English-speaking researchers, let me introduce Cristin.
Cristin is a common female name, and an acronym for Current Research Information System in Norway
Cristin is a national system where information about research and researchers is collected. It contains data about people, publications, and projects. Some of the information is harvested automatically and some of it is up to you to register. My advice is that you get to know the system, because you will have to deal with it sooner or later.
Result-based funding
The Norwegian Publication Indicator (NPI) is a model used to distribute result-based funding to research insitutions. When you publish original research results in approved channels, they earn points, which in turn will actuate a payment to the institution you have credited in the publication. For HVL to obtain points and payment for your publications, you must a) use HVL as your address in the publication, and b) make sure the publication is correctly registered in Cristin.
The approved publication channels are listed in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, and divided into level 1 and level 2. To learn more, please visit the webpage of NPI, where you will find exhaustive information about the model.
Not all publications are liable to points
In the Norwegian Publication Indicator, in order to be defined as academic and liable to points, a publication must:
- present new insight
- be presented in a form that allows the research findings to be verified and/or used in new research
- be written in a language and have a distribution that make the publication accessible to the majority of interested researchers
- appear in an authorised publication channel (journal, series, book publishers, website) that has procedures for external peer review
If you think your article, book chapter or book fulfills these criteria, it is important that you register it in one of the scientific categories in Cristin. The library will check the publication and your registration, and if it is approved, report it to the authorities as one of HVLs academic publications.
Not all publications must be registered manually or by you
Many publications are imported to Cristin from Scopus or other sources. If you have co-authors, one of them may already have registered your publication. It is, however, your responsibility as a publishing researcher, to check and make sure that all the publications you have (co-)authored are in, and correct, at the latest by the end of January the year after publication.
Please upload the fulltext to Cristin
You can upload fulltexts to Cristin, by clicking «Deliver full-text document». Please do so with all your journal articles.
The National goals and guidelines for open access to research articles from 2017 state that all publicly funded research articles must be deposited in a suitable academic repository.
The aim is that the articles be made openly available in archives – eg institutional ones like our HVL Open – if and when the publisher allows it. Your contract with the publisher regulates, and may restrict, your freedom to publish your article. That need not prevent you from uploading it. The library will look into the policy of the publisher of any article uploaded to Cristin, and check whether, when and how it may be made available. Publishers practically always allow archiving, but may only allow a particular version of a text to be published, and perhaps only after an embargo period of 6 or 12 months after a journal has published it.
«If it’s not in Cristin, it hasn’t happened»
Other research activites, such as conference attendance and poster presentations, and non-academic publications can also be registered in Cristin. They will not be counted in when points are calculated, but that does not mean they are not interesting. The information in Cristin is open to the public, and anyone can search for your personal profile, and see what you have registered. You can also select up to five publications to appear on your profile page on HVLs website.
Research groups and projects
The personal profiles of researchers, and the publications and other activities attached to them, form the core of the Cristin database. There is, however, also a module for research groups and projects. Once you have created a profile for a group or a project, you can link to publications and activities from it, and include diverse elements to create a kind of communal CV for the project.
Do you need help with Cristin?
Cristin provides a guide in English on how to register publications on their Researcher pages. The library can help you with Cristin-related issues. If you have trouble logging on to Cristin, registering or uploading elements, send an email to cristin@hvl.no, and we will try to help you.