First-ever euroCRIS meeting in Türkiye: Nov 25-27 at the IZTECH

Pablo de Castro, euroCRIS Technical Secretary – on behalf of the SMM2025 organising team at the IYTE and euroCRIS

Recent euroCRIS meetings have been held in Leuven Belgium (Spring 2025), Paris France (Autumn 2024), Vienna Austria (Spring 2024), Pamplona Spain (Autumn 2023), Brussels Belgium (Spring 2023) and Nijmegen Netherlands (Autumn 2022). Additional pre-Covid ones were held (among many others) in Warsaw, Helsinki, Münster, Rome, St Andrews, Athens and Prague.

These biannual meetings that bring together the research information community usually rotate across European cities and countries – next year we will be in Ponta Delgada, Azores Islands, Portugal. However, this is the first time euroCRIS comes to Türkiye and we owe a big thanks to the team at the IYTE Library – and to its Director Gültekin Gürdal in particular – for the opportunity to visit the country.

euroCRIS meetings are all about community engagement. Many different stakeholders from various countries have these euroCRIS meetings on their agenda, either to present or just to listen and take part in the discussions. These colleagues include among others research managers and librarians at institutions, research funders, national offices for research information management and Open Science, software vendors and computer scientists of all kinds. We sincerely hope to be able to promote the same kind of international discussion on various developments in the domain at this SMM2025 (SMM: Strategic Membership Meeting) that we have had in previous events.

The event programme is not yet finalised, but it’s in an advanced stage and it already shows a number of ‘hot topics’ that will surface across presentations, panel discussions and sessions. If we were to point out a general theme for this event it would be that of “What is going on in Türkiye in the area of research information management and Open Science and how it compares to what is happening in Europe”. The National Session on Day I will particularly focus on the “what’s going on in Türkiye”, whereas Day II will look at developments more widely keeping Türkiye firmly in place as a point of reference and comparison.

This National Session on Day I – which will take most of the day – will address a wide range of areas of activity in the Turkish national research information management and open science landscape. These will include topics like Scholarly Communications platforms (both repositories and CRIS systems), Open Access, Transformative Agreements, Research Data Management or Persistent Identifiers among others. This session will provide an excellent opportunity for the international participants to learn more about local practices and initiatives. Critically, it will also allow a discussion to take place at a national level.

We are particularly glad to have a presentation on this National Session devoted to the (already finished) FEUTURE Horizon 2020-funded project – The Future of EU-Turkey Relations. Mapping Dynamics and Testing Scenarios. Open Science and Open Access advocates everywhere are trying to promote the Open Research Europe platform as a worthwhile target for research publishing and it’s inspiring to see some of this project’s publications available at the ORE.

On Day II the focus will largely move onto international developments in areas like AI, national research portals or persistent identifiers. We will have an outstanding euroCRIS Strategic Partner session with ORCID, OpenAIRE and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) reporting on their recent work.

In order to make it easier for this knowledge exchange to take place in person, the euroCRIS Board decided that attendees from organisations in Türkiye would be offered free registration to this event.

We look forward to a fruitful first-ever euroCRIS membership meeting in Türkiye.