The RISIS project aims at creating a distributed research infrastructure to support and
advance science and innovation studies. This will give the field a strong scientific push
forward, and at the same time, provide a radically improved evidence base for research and
innovation policies, for research evaluation, and for the quality of policy relevant indicators.
The field of science and innovation studies is interdisciplinary, and is related to political
sciences, sociology, management studies 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 were lacking or small scale only. This has made the field
too much 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.
Data and platforms are currently owned and/or located at many different organizations, such
as individual research groups, companies, and public organizations ? with very restricted
access to others and with poor or non-existing updates. Through deploying various
networking and access strategies, and through joint research, RISIS will decisively open,
harmonize, integrate, improve, and extend their availability, sustainability, quality and use.
