VIRTA Publication Information Service is part of the national Research Information Hub. The service, operated by the Ministry of Education and Culture, brings together all information from scholarly publications on all Finnish research organisations (universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutions and university hospitals). It helps make cohesive and up-to-date comparison data of Finnish scientific publication outputs available. The publication information can be utilised in various systems and services.
The publication information in the VIRTA service is sourced from the research organisations’ own research information systems, publication registers or the JUSTUS service.
The information in the VIRTA Publication Information Service will be used for the annual publication data collection by the Ministry of Education and Culture. The service was introduced at the beginning of 2016. All organisations participating in the publication data collection have reported their publications to VIRTA since spring 2017.
The publication information in the VIRTA Publication Information Service can be browsed via the Research.fi service. The information will also be transferred to the international OpenAire portal if the organisations providing the information have consented to this.
Utilising the information
The Ministry of Education and Culture uses the data collected through the Virta Publication Information Service to steer the institutes of higher education (calculating a funding model, monitoring KPIs, the Ministry’s feedback to the institutes of higher education), for external reporting and collaboration with other administrative branches, and for demonstrating the state of Finnish higher education institute.
VIRTA is used as a data source for Vipunen Education Statistics service, which allows statistical analyses pertaining to publication information to be carried out. Statistics Finland also uses the data received through the Ministry of Education and Culture’s information collection.
The publication information used for the application and reporting process of the Academy of Finland’s research funding is collected in the Academy’s own system from the VIRTA service. The publications can be retrieved and saved to the application or report via the REST interface. The publication information attached to the funding application comprises materials for the scientific evaluation of a project funded by the Academy of Finland or a project that is applying for the funding. Publication information is also an essential part of the project report. Statistical data is collected from the publications reported by the researchers and it can be analysed applying the methods of publication metrics.
In the service, the peer reviewed publications reported to the VIRTA Publication Information System will be assigned a Publication Forum level, based on which publication scores are calculated for publications by the institutes of higher education for their funding model. The Virta Publication Information System is connected to the publication channel database of Publication Forum, which includes the information on all journals, series and publishers evaluated by Publication Forum.
Figure 1. Utilising the information in VIRTA Publication Information System. Source: Use of VIRTA's Publication Information, eDuuni wikipage, https://wiki.eduuni.fi/display/cscvirtajtp/Use+of+VIRTA%27s+Publication+Information, 9 February 2023.
Responsibilities
The research organisations are responsible for the content and accuracy of any information they save in the system as well as for keeping it up to date. The Ministry of Education and Culture (OKM) is responsible for the costs of the data storage and its lifecycle management, general operations, usability and data security. The service is produced and implemented by CSC.
Sources
Tiedonkeruun käsikirja (no date) [online]. Available: https://wiki.eduuni.fi/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=39984937 [Accessed 21.10.2021]
VIRTA-julkaisutietopalvelun sivut eduuni-wikissä (no date) [online]. Available: https://wiki.eduuni.fi/display/cscvirtajtp/VIRTA-julkaisutietopalvelu [Accessed 21.10.2021]
VIRTA-julkaisutietopalvelu (CSC:n sivu) (no date) [online]. Available: https://www.csc.fi/-/virta-julkaisutietopalvelu [Accessed 21.10.2021]