Implementing a CRIS with PureInstitutional Repository Managers’ Workshop

15th June 2012

Overview

• Background– Research Context– Open Access at Royal Holloway

• Current Research Information System– Procurement– Implementation– Training Programme

• Connector to the Repository

• Political Considerations

• Capitalising on Academic Engagement

Research Context

• Royal Holloway is part of the University of London– 8800 Students– Of which 1700 on PG courses

• Part of the 1994 Group of “smaller, research-intensive universities”

• 60% of research profile is rated as world-leading or internationally excellent (national average is 50%)

• The Department of Music is the top department in the UK, further recognition of its world-leading research excellence

• A further eight departments are in the top 10 ranked by proportion of 3* and 4* research:

– Biological Sciences (joint 3rd), Drama (joint 9th), Earth Sciences (joint 7th), Economics (joint 9th), Geography (joint 9th), German (joint 5th), Media Arts (joint 6th) and Psychology (joint 5th)

Open Access at Royal Holloway

• Royal Holloway previously used EPrints software as part of the SHERPA-LEAP project

• At the end of LEAP, we moved to commercial Equella software, hosted internally by College IT

• Since 2010 there has been a College-wide requirement that all research outputs are made publicly available wherever possible

• In addition we have a requirement that PhD theses are also made openly accessible via the repository, with options for short embargoes

• There is strong high-level support for open access

• There is a low level of academic self-motivation for open access – Though – this is changing…

Current Research Information System (CRIS)

• The system is called ‘Pure’ and is a commercial software made by a Danish firm called ‘Atira’. It will be used to manage the REF (Research Excellence Framework) submission.

• Pure enables academic staff to easily manage and present their research outputs. Academics are expected to use the Pure system themselves.

• Pure generates the researcher and departmental research pages of the new College website.

• Is now the means for uploading material to the repository – the Repository is now connected to the CRIS. We will be turning off the existing deposit interfaces in Equella.

CRIS - Procurement

• The procurement was led by the Vice Principal (Research & Enterprise), Director of Strategy, Director of Research & Enterprise, with input from the library and IT.

• The primary motivation was to have a software capable managing the submission for REF 2014 and to avoid the pain of previous RAEs.

• Secondary motivations included:

– Providing an established infrastructure for future research management and reporting

– Provide an easy way for staff to manage research profiles on the College website

– Providing one interface for sending fulltext to the repository

CRIS - Implementation

• The implementation of Pure was led by a Project Manager based in IT.

• A new College website was launched around the same time, using one single CMS (Contensis). All academic and researcher pages and profiles are driven and populated by Pure.

• Academics were invited to submit publications lists for inclusion on the new web pages – with a deadline.

• After the deadline academics were responsible for updating pages themselves.

CRIS Training Programme

• In September 2011 we recruited a Research Information Officer to work in the Digital Collections Team in the library

• We now offer training and in-office support to academics on how to use Pure. We use the opportunities these meetings provide to talk about open access and which versions of research outputs they need to put into the system.

• Take-up was initially slow but with REF as a strong driver for using the system, more and more academics are taking an interest in their profiles.

Connector to the Repository

• The vision has always been that we maintain Equella as a document store and that Pure will be the means of deposit and surfacing research content

• This area of development was difficult and time consuming with the connector going through many iterations before it is released

• The connector went live in late May and has been very successful – its functionality exceeded our expectations

Political Considerations

• Royal Holloway’s faculties and departments are fairly autonomous and it is more difficult to effect institution-wide change or top-down policies than in other universities

• You need to strike a balance between being sensitive to academics’ individual needs and getting compliance – often this ends in compromise, with neither party entirely happy

• Academics are not used to taking instructions from library staff – they see us as being at their service

• We could not have achieved what we have without the support of Research & Enterprise.

• REF and R&E considerations will still come before open access.

Capitalising on Academic Engagement

• Going out and showing people how to work the system allows you to get honest feedback about it and uncover hidden objections

• By and large, academics have been much more impressed by the CRIS than they ever were by the repository – and rightly so – it does much more for them.

• We no longer talk about ‘the repository’, but about updating their profile and adding fulltext publications wherever possible

• By getting out and seeing people more than we used to we have been able to capitalise on the recent surge of academic interest in open access.

Questions?

dominic.tate@rhul.ac.uk

01784 276 619