VIRTA higher education achievement register

VIRTA publication information service

Using the VIRTA publication information service

The VIRTA publication information service compiles metadata about all publications from all Finnish research organisations. The information is useful in various services and process concerning researchers. The information can be transferred to other organisations, such as research funders, publication or research data repositories, research infrastructure services, or other services used by researchers in order to avoid manual input. The VIRTA publication information service will provide the higher education institutions and other research organisations with up-to-date, comparative data on their own publications, as well as those of other institutions.

Data contents

The VIRTA publication information service includes all information on the scholarly publications by the Finnish higher education institutions, research institutes and the university hospital districts. It enables the research organisations to present, correct and complete the data online. The metadata have been gathered by the Ministry of Education and Culture since 2011. Eventually the VIRTA service will contain up-to-date information on all the publications produced by the Finnish research organisations, including, within reasonable limits, all past publications. The contents of the VIRTA service will be accessible via open APIs by any system or service.

Implementation and launch

The VIRTA publication information service has been launched in the spring 2016. Any higher education institution, research institute and university hospital have thereafter been invited to join. The pilot was conducted in March 2016 through the collection of publication information by the Ministry of Education and Culture. In the spring 2017, the Ministry’s entire collection of publication information will be executed through the VIRTA publication information service. The Academy of Finland will pilot using VIRTA in its reporting service in the spring 2016. Additional information (in Finnish).