How many and which European Research Organizations are involved in Research and Innovation? How are distributed and interlinked each other? OrgReg, the first Register of Public-Sector Organizations, is a set towards answering to this question, which is increasingly important given the role attributed to research organizations by new managerial paradigms in science and higher education policies.
“OrgReg is a facility developed within RISIS to provide a reference list of research organizations and higher education institutions belonging to public sector above a minimal threshold of research output”, says Benedetto Lepori, professor of Science Communication at USI (Università della Svizzera italiana), RISIS partner and one of OrgReg creator.
“While European registers have a long tradition in the private sector, for instance Eurostat, used as statistical and research instrument, no similar tradition in the public sector is observed. Only recently, registers started to emerge with the European Tertiary Education Register, ETER for what concerns Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)”.
Built on ETER, OrgReg has extended the coverage to all non-market oriented organizations with a sizeable research output, including specifically Public Research Organizations (PROs) and Research Hospitals (RH), as well as Private Non-Profit research Organizations (PNP) and, in the next release, Research Funding Organizations.
With 5,505 entities and 39 countries covered, OrgReg provides a perfect identity document of Public Research: every entity is associated with an identifier stable over time and complemented with demographic information, including foundation, closure year and tracking demographic events. Legal and English name are included, as a set of characteristic of entities: website, country of establishment, entity type and level (group, organizations, and component). Finally, we can find geographical locations of each entity, including postcode, city name, and geographical coordinates.
The facility is not meant to be isolated, but a tool to interconnect some key data sources in RISIS. “Currently, OrgReg identifiers are available in the Web of Science database at CWTS, in the EUPRO database at AIT and in the PATSTAT database at IFRIS – as well as in the RISIS-ETER database”, Lepori says. “This allows researchers to easily merge data at the organizational level from different sources at the organizational level. As a further step, OrgReg will be transformed into a true research database providing information on research output of all public research organizations in Europe”.
OrgReg is a public resource that can be accessed and downloaded on line upon pre-registration from orgreg.joanneum.at.
