VIRTA in English

The Ministry for Education and Culture in Finland collects bibliographic information on scientific publications annually from 14 Finnish universities, five university hospital districts, 23 universities of applied sciences and 12 state research institutes. In total this makes ca. 60 000 publications per year including books, journal articles, conference papers and non-scholarly publications.

VIRTA Publication Information Service is an advanced decentralized solution to integrate institutional data at the national level that was launched in the spring 2016. VIRTA is a data warehouse, “a data hub”, that complies bibliographic information of all scientific publications from Finnish research organizations using different local solutions for publication data collection, such as commercial Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), self-made publication registers, institutional publication repositories and e-forms. 

VIRTA provides the higher education institutes and other research organizations with up-to-date comparative metadata on their own publications and makes the data available for other services to use and produce comprehensive and comparative information on publishing activity both nationally and institutionally.

The publication metadata can be transferred to research funders, publication or data repositories, infrastructure services, or any other service used by researchers. The annual data is also publicly available in Vipunen (statistical data) and Juuli (bibliographic data) services.