Research Infrastructure for Research
and Innovation Policy Studies (RISIS)

The Research Infrastructure for Research and Innovation Policy Studies (RISIS) project aimed to create a distributed research infrastructure to support and advance science and innovation studies, providing a strong scientific foundation for the field and a radically improved evidence base for research and innovation policies, for research evaluation and policy relevant indicators.

The field of science and innovation studies is interdisciplinary, and is related to political sciences, sociology, management and economics. It has a strong quantitative core – with specialties such as scientometrics, technometrics and more widely indicators design – but for many important questions data are lacking or small scale only. This has made the field too dependent on a few pre-existing datasets. However, during the last decade important efforts have been undertaken to develop new datasets on burning issues such as industrial R&D globalisation, patenting activities of firms, university performance, Europeanisation through joint programming, or the dynamics of nano S&T. Another new characteristic of the field is the development – together with computer scientists – of software platforms for collecting, integrating and analysing ever more data.

Previously, data and platforms were owned and/or located at many different organizations, such as individual research groups, companies, and public organizations – with very restricted access. Through deploying various networking and access strategies and conducting joint research, RISIS has opened up, harmonized, integrated, improved, and extended the availability, quality and use of these resources.

For more information see https://risis2.eu/.

Currently, RISIS activities and access to data are managed directly by the involved organizations, the Higher Education Data have been integrated in the European Higher Education Sector Observatory (EHESO). The RISIS seminar series is currently managed by the Austrian Institute of Technology.