RISIS final report. An overview of one decade of construction of a distributed European infrastructure on STI datasets and positioning indicators

RISIS is a European research infrastructure promoted by 20 European academic institutions, operated by researchers themselves and co-financed by two successive FP projects. Its objective is to support the development of positioning indicators for informing science technology and innovation policies. It combines different datasets answering FAIR principles and that are all harmonised thanks to a set of integrating services. Most datasets in the STI world being mainly textual, RISIS integrates open access semantic analysis and visualisation tools. Finally on key policy topics RISIS has developed interfacing tools that offer access to standardised positioning indicators. RISIS as an infrastructure is the outcome of nearly 20 years of research investment. The approach to RISIS (with the central notion of positioning indicators) was born within the PRIME Network of excellence (2004-2010). RISIS1 (2014-2018) was dedicated to demonstrating the feasibility of a research infrastructure: professionalise, harmonise and enrich relevant research datasets, start developing integrating services, opening them systematically for transnational access, start developing integrating services, test the interest of the research community. This being successfully done, RISIS2 (2019-2023) had the ambition of and in our view succeeded in turning the infrastructure fully operational and in extending its coverage and use. This working paper is an overall presentation of what RISIS has achieved and where it is heading in the future.