BU Research Blog

BRIAN is likely to be unavailable between 9am and 12noon on Thursday, 1st November 2012 whilst the system upgrades to a new version.  I say likely as the issues experienced yesterday with the network have put all systems at risk.  I will issue a blog post tomorrow to state whether or not the upgrade will take place and I will also put a warning notice on the log-in screen for BRIAN informing users of when the system will be unavailable.

The upgrade will include a new look user profile page within BRIAN and so your home page will look different, however, all functions will remain the same.  There will be the addition of a ‘Favourites’ tab, which will allow for a separate display of publications that you have flagged as a ‘favourite’ (please note that ‘favourites’ are only available in BRIAN and not replicated in the web based external staff profile pages).

If you choose to make a publication ‘invisible’ (you may choose to do this for publications of a sensitive/controversial nature) then this will be hidden in your external profile page.  However, if you co-author with another BU academic, the publication will only be hidden for the author who has selected to make it ‘invisible’.  Therefore, you will need to discuss with all relevant BU authors whether a publication will be visible externally by one or none of you.

There will be an improved link between Supervisors and PhD students.  When Supervisors add their PhD students to their BRIAN account, this currently creates a false link for the student in the external staff profile pages.  The upgrade will enable a hyperlink within the Supervisors external profile page to the Students external profile page.  More details will follow on this.

The authors for publications will be displayed in the external staff profile pages as ‘BU Authors’ and ‘Other Authors’.  The BU Authors will be hyperlinked so that users can go directly to a BU staff members profile page.

There will be a number of changes to the REF module, which will mainly benefit the RKEDO team.

There are a number of developments still to take place on BRIAN.  This includes the Grants module, which should go live shortly.

Please note that the user guides and videos will contain screen prints of the previous homepage.  These will be updated in due course.