Research funders and research organisations both require feedback on the progress, productivity and quality of the research they support. This information originates with researchers, but may be captured in a variety of systems including University CRIS/IR and funder systems. In 2014 all 7 national Research Councils (collectively referred to as RCUK) implemented a harmonised approach to the collection of research output data, currently supported by Researchfish Ltd (referred to as the Researchfish® system). In 2016 this process is gathering feedback from over 60,000 researchers in all UK Universities, and for funders in the USA, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands, tracking more than £40billion of public and charity research investment and is adding to a dataset of more than 1.5 million outputs.

Researchers, research managers and funders want to find ways to capture this data once and achieve wide re-use of the information. Working together University and Research Council officers, Researchfish Ltd. and Jisc have highlighted that it is important for the “interoperability” between research information systems to be improved. These organisations have started a programme of work to improve the bi-directional flow of information between University and funder systems.