Italian universities already produce and expose a vast amount of research information, from scholarly output, such as publications, dataset, and software, to costs, projects, and skills. Much of this information is distributed across institutional repositories, CRIS systems, university presses, data repositories, open scholarly infrastructures, and closed or commercial platforms.

The challenge is not scarcity, but aggregation, and connection. Research information is often available, but not always complete, interoperable, verifiable, or easy to reuse. When data remain fragmented, monitoring becomes weaker too: indicators may show activity, but they cannot always build trust.

This is where the Italian Research Monitor pilot begins: with the question of how to build a shared, open and trustworthy evidence base for research monitoring in Italy.

A national pilot for open research monitoring

OpenAIRE and nine Italian universities have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly explore and validate a national model for monitoring research and Open Science practices. The pilot brings together Politecnico di Torino, Scuola Normale Superiore, Università degli Studi di Milano, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Università degli Studi di Padova, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, Università degli Studi di Torino and Università degli Studi di Trento showing that this is not the effort of a single institution, but a shared commitment to improve research information and Open Science monitoring at national level.

The ten-month pilot is currently testing OpenAIRE MONITOR at institutional and national levels and remains open to additional Italian universities and Research Performing Organisations. Beyond dashboards, the work focuses on improving metadata quality, interoperability and coordinated data curation across participating institutions.

The real infrastructure is the data

Reliable research monitoring is not only a matter of creating dashboards. It depends on the quality, consistency, and interoperability of the underlying data.

Participating universities are working with OpenAIRE to improve metadata quality, reduce duplication, strengthen affiliation disambiguation and connect institutional sources such as publications and data repositories, CRIS systems, and publishing platforms with the OpenAIRE Graph.

The goal is practical: make Italian research information easier to connect, verify and reuse, so that monitoring can support better visibility, better reporting and more informed institutional and national research strategies.

Why the Italian Research Monitor matters now

Recent European initiatives on research assessment, such as CoARA and the Barcelona Declaration, have highlighted the importance of quality, openness, transparency, and trustworthy governance of research information.

For universities, this has practical implications for monitoring, reporting, and institutional decision-making. The accountability and reliability of these activities depend on whether data can be verified, indicators are transparent, and the diversity of disciplinary, linguistic, and publication cultures is adequately represented beyond what is captured by dominant databases.

This also represents a national challenge: Italy has data, tools and expertise, but there is a lack of coordination. By working through the OpenAIRE Graph and OpenAIRE MONITOR, the pilot tests whether local data improvements can become part of a broader, shared evidence base for research monitoring in Italy. The interest in and need for joint monitoring first emerged back in 2023, thanks to the group of universities that drew up the initial proposal, based on the National Open Science Plan.

The OpenAIRE Graph as a shared foundation

The Italian Research Monitor pilot is built on the OpenAIRE Graph, one of the world’s largest open scholarly knowledge graphs. It connects research outputs, organisations, funders, projects, researchers, citations, and usage evidence into a shared research information space.

This matters because open research monitoring should not be a black box. With OpenAIRE MONITOR, universities can see indicators, understand where the information comes from, and contribute to improving the data behind them.

For the participating universities, better metadata and stronger links between outputs, projects and organisations can improve institutional visibility, reporting, and the quality of research monitoring within a shared national framework.

Towards a shared monitoring approach

The Italian Research Monitor pilot goes beyond the testing of a dashboard. It is about exploring what is needed for a more coordinated and community-driven approach to research monitoring in Italy.

For this reason, the pilot combines OpenAIRE MONITOR with data refinement sprints, training activities, shared documentation, and the collection of lessons learned across participating institutions.

By working together on metadata quality, interoperability, and data curation, universities can strengthen their capacity to understand and govern their own research information, while contributing to a broader evidence base for monitoring and Open Science policies at institutional and national levels. The expected value is practical: better visibility for researchers, stronger evidence for universities, and a clearer understanding of how Italian research information can be improved, connected and used for monitoring at institutional and national level.

The pilot will not solve every challenge at once. But it can show what becomes possible when universities work together on the data behind research monitoring.

Before you can monitor research, you need to trust the data.
Italian universities are starting there.

The Italian Research Monitor is an important step towards a more open, transparent and reliable evidence base for research monitoring in Italy. It aims to show the value of universities working together to make research information more reliable, open, connected and useful. The objective of the pilot consists in verifying that the Monitor can support both institutional needs and a broader national approach to Open Science monitoring and policies, by strengthening shared practices around metadata, interoperability, and data curation within an open, participatory infrastructure.

I am delighted to see Italian universities coming together around a shared objective: building a more open, transparent, and trustworthy foundation for research monitoring. This initiative is not only about quality indicators, but rather improving the quality, interoperability, and reuse of research information across the country. By working collectively, we can strengthen the evidence base available to institutions, researchers, and Open Science policymakers in Italy, helping to support the adoption of open and transparent data for research evaluation and monitoring.