Institute for Scientific and Technical Information - French National Center for Scientific Research

The Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (INIST-CNRS), a unit of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), has been for over 20 years offering services to scientists, engineers and scholarly information professionals, by facilitating access to all fields of worldwide scientific research.

INIST-CNRS is running various, mostly domain-specific portals providing access to the discipline’s key literature and major databases. It also offers RefDoc, a platform designed for scientific and technical document supply, containing more than 50 million records.

INST-CNRS produces bibliographic databases, in science, medicine and technology, as well as in social sciences and humanities. These will be increasingly completed by data collections and by developments aiming at the integration of research data into existing services.

In the field of research e-infrastructures, INIST-CNRS has created SIDR, a platform for sharing and dissemination of data in systems biology, and is involved in CLARIN, a European ESFRI project in the field of linguistics.

Working currently with several French data producers for the assignment of DOIs, INIST-CNRS sees its role primarily in the promotion of DataCite and persistent identifiers for digital objects at a national level.