Transforming a Commercial CRIS into Governed, Analytics-Ready Research Information Infrastructure: The MUREX Portal Case at Mahidol University
Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), such as Elsevier's Pure platform, provide centralized research records but are often underused for governance-driven analytics. This paper presents GARI (Governed, Analytics-Ready Institutional Research Information Infrastructure), a four-layer framework for transforming a commercial CRIS into an analyticsready institutional platform through source and identifier management, entity linkage, governance and quality gates, and reporting analytics. We demonstrate GARI through the University CRIS (MUREX Portal), a Pure-based production deployment covering 4,606 person records, including 4,325 current researchers, 62,091 research outputs, and 1,768 funding-related records (856 awards and 912 funding applications) as of 30 June 2026. Institutional extensions include data stewardship roles, scheduled synchronization, quality checks, downstream analytics, and dashboard reuse. A consolidated profile-readiness query combined affiliation and linked-output criteria with three identifier layers-ORCID iD, the NRIIS integration identifier, and Scopus Author ID-showing readiness of 651/4,325 (15.1%), 3,698/4,325 (85.5%), 3,750/4,325 (86.7%), and 3,683/4,325 (85.2%) for open interoperability, national-system synchronization, bibliometric analytics, and national-bibliometric linkage, respectively. Internal workflow mapping also indicates that administrative processing time for internal-grant intake, excluding the fixed committee-review period, decreased by approximately 70%. Knowledge-graph and retrieval-augmentedgeneration functions remain prototype-stage extensions. The case suggests that a commercial CRIS supports strategic analytics only after an institution layers governance, identifier discipline, and integration pipelines onto the vendor platform.