The need for a comprehensive infrastructure for scholarly publication information has been on the EU’s agenda for a long time. Also, the European Commission’s open science policy highlights the necessity of a good information base to follow up open access publishing across Europe. However, an all-inclusive information infrastructure on research publications is still missing. During the past 10 years, European countries have invested significantly in national research information infrastructures. Now, at least 20 European countries have a national database for research publication metadata. The strength of these databases lies in their comprehensiveness and quality assurance since they often have a mandatory nature. They are, however, neither yet integrated nor widely used for cross- country comparisons. To this end, a proof of concept of a European publication infrastructure was carried out in the framework of ENRESSH (www.enressh.eu). The ENRESSH-VIRTA-PoC integrated publication data from four countries and the concept was built on the strengths of the Finnish national VIRTA system. This paper highlights the results from the PoC and outlines future steps towards the integration of national publication databases in Europe.

The volume of research is increasing along with the steadily increasing digitization of research and the advent of open science. This puts a pressure on research information systems, which try to work with various research output types (e.g. publications and datasets) and the related information. This is even more of an acute issue for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). When compared to e.g. natural sciences, SSH's representation in various forms of research outputs is often lacking in research databases. One solution is national Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), which aim to provide a realistic and disciplinarily balanced picture on the research outputs produced by various research organizations in a given country. To achieve this, metadata for research outputs need to be consistent and, above all, interoperable. One component in this is to use persistent identifiers (PIDs). This paper presents a case of interoperability of SSH publications, datasets, and infrastructures. Linking research outputs, funding decisions, actors, and organizations with PIDs is the starting point of the Finnish Research.fi portal. We present and discuss the advancements that PIDs provide for research information management from the SSH point of view.

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