The project was launched at the beginning of 2011 as a partnership project co-financed by the European Union under the European Social Fund. As a result, POL-on has been developed under the leadership of the Ministry of Higher Education and in cooperation of three entities, namely: the National Information Processing Institute, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw, and Index Copernicus Ltd. Since 2014, the system has been maintained and developed solely by the National Information Processing Institute. Although the system properly fulfils all the goals, it is going to be redesigned due to reforms of Polish science and higher education which are currently taking place.
The Polish universities and research units are obliged by the law to provide various information and store it in the central system, i.e. in POL-on. The information concerns their educational and scientific activities: students, researchers and academic teachers, academic degrees and titles, faculties and studies, diploma theses, projects, patents, publications, conferences, awards, laboratories and their equipment, properties, investments, etc. The data can be transferred to the system by using tools of mass import or may be manually entered via web interfaces. However, the automatic import is available only for limited kinds of data, mainly information regarding students and researchers. Regardless of the method of data delivery, all records are validated according to the rules based on the law and the best practices.
The project was launched in response to many problems associated with considerable costs of procurement and quality of data from universities and scientific institutions. In a process of detailed analysis of the workability, an array of issues was defined which the project was supposed to solve. Those included mainly:
- simplification of reporting and data quality criteria procured by public administration entities Ð the lack of coordination between these institutions in the scope of required reporting. A frequent problem was reporting of this data in several reports, as well as different interpretations by various institutions;
- lack of credible knowledge necessary for the proper distribution of public funds and practical implementation of fact-based policy;
- lack of credible knowledge about the quality of education at different universities for university candidates;
- improvement of oversight of public spending Ð the system made it possible to verify numerous phenomena in the area of teaching and establishing public educational policy, including Ð among other things Ð awarding material help from more than one source at many universities;
- proper evaluation of the education quality and science Ð the data from the system constitutes the main source for the process of parametric evaluation of scientific potential of research units in Poland, as well as university rankings;
- lack of uniform IT solutions as part of the system framework supported and developed by universities and science institutes causing increased expenses on a national scale and their limited effectiveness.
The launching of the project was preceded by an array of expert opinions and research aiming to identify key social needs and the way to address tchem.