Croatian Projects Database

Usage of the unique object identifiers is crucial for accomplishing interoperability between different web services and platforms. OpenAIRE has made great progress in linking EC funded projects with publications and research data on the EU level by indexing harvested data and making that information available through the API. In Croatia, we use this API to get the updated project information and besides the EC funded projects, we are also linking research projects by Croatian funding bodies, e.g. Croatian Science Foundation, Ministry of science and education, etc. Since this data was not provided through OpenAIRE API a decision was made to create a service which will enable tracking all project activities on a national level and push that information back to OpenAIRE.

On that premise, during 2016, a small team at Ruđer Bošković Institute's Centre for Scientific Information were working on the Croatian national projects database which collects information about all projects with Croatian involvement, either as a coordinator or partner. The database has initially been populated with the data provided by Ministry of Science and Education, Croatian Scientific Foundation and the data about European Commission projects (FP6, FP7, H2020) was automatically added using OpenAIRE API. OpenAIRE team was very responsive and helpful, and all records were indexed and tested in OpenAIRE development environment.

[caption id="attachment_1777" align="alignright" width="300"] Search and filter page that implements basic search, multiple filters and sorting possibilities.


Available data on research projects are often limited to the basic information such as project title, project ID, project leader, funder's name and the funding period. Our system is designed to accommodate broader set of data on the project (project URL, project description, keywords, acronym, total cost, status), funder (funding scheme, jurisdiction), institutions (title, role), and persons involved in the project (name, role, affiliation).

The administrative interface uses web technology and enables an addition of new records and updating existing ones through multi-level access privileges: project leaders can edit their own records, institution administrator has access to all projects owned by a particular institution and super-admin is a level with access to all features. New projects can be added by any member of the Croatian authentication and authorisation infrastructure using the unique electronic identity. New funders and institutions can be added during the new project entry, while duplicates are avoided through a verification by the institutional administrator.

Project database offers API is used by other Croatian repositories as a controlled vocabulary for linking publications with projects. For now, API is used for autocompletion by institutional repositories of the University of Zagreb Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb School of Medicine and Ruđer Bošković Institute. These repositories are on ePrints platform and use AJAX-based autocompletion, so they need to be added manually to our headers because of Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). Another repository infrastructure that uses PDB API is DABAR (Digital Academic Archives and Repositories). DABAR uses a full export type in CSV format for further parsing. In the future, more appropriate type of API export or autocompletion will be developed, needed by platforms like Islandora, an open-source software framework used by DABAR.

The second phase of PDP will include further development of the administrative interface as well as dissemination activities and training for institutional administrators.

Production URL of the service is https://pdb.irb.hr (in Croatian).

Authors: Karlo Hrenović and Alen Vodopijevec, Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb