Tagged / PMS

Register now for BRIAN Demonstrations – the new Publication Management System

Guidance

The new publication management system BRIAN (Bournemouth Research, Information and Networking) will go live on 22 June 2012.  BRIAN will provide a facility for academics to quickly and easily update their research activity via a single point of data entry which will enable research information to be used in multiple places, including BURO and the BU Staff Profile web pages, without the need to duplicate or enter additional data.  Academic staff will no longer add records direct to BURO, but via BRIAN.

BRIAN will allow you to have ownership of your staff profile web pages so these are easily kept up to date, allowing you to promote yourself for potential research collaborations, research grants and enterprise opportunities, research assessment exercises, etc.  It will also provide a search function for staff to find out about potential collaborative opportunities with colleagues from across BU.  BRIAN will enable BU to meet research assessment requirements by improving the administrative efficiency and data accuracy.

Demonstrations of the new system have been arranged and each will run for one hour and will also allow time for you to interact with the new system.  These are being held on the following dates:

24th May – 1pm – to be held in CG21, Christchurch House

29th May – 10am – to be held in CG21, Christchurch House

29th May – 2pm – to be held in CG21, Christchurch House

6th June – 10am – to be held in P231-5, Poole House

6th June – 2pm – to be held in P231-5, Poole House

It is highly recommended that all academics attend a demonstration of BRIAN as the system will be extremely important to your research profile.

To register for a session, please select your preferred date and a second choice (as demand will be high) and email this to Joan Bonnici at: ovctemp@bournemouth.ac.uk by 22nd May 2012.

Do you want to engage with BRIAN? Or are you more partial to a bit of BROS?

Guidance

Maybe you see Megalith as the towering winner, or you think BRAIN is the cleverest suggestion? Or is it RAD that you think is most radical?!

Symplectic Elements as the new research management system that BU is implementing this summer and it needs a name.

     

Whatever your preference remember to cast your vote before 19 August!

Happy voting! 🙂

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Have your say! What should the new research management system be called?

Last month I wrote a post announcing Symplectic Elements as the new research management system that BU is implementing this summer (you can read this post here).

We’re now at the exciting stage of naming the system! The steering group has come up with a list of possible names for you to vote on. Cast your votes below!

If you’d like to add some alternative suggestions, please do this by adding comments to this post. You can also add comments to this post about the alternative suggestions that have been added!

The poll will be open until 19 August. Happy voting! 🙂

[polldaddy poll=5372385]

Symplectic Elements: BU’s new research management system

I’d like to introduce you to Symplectic Elements – our soon-to-be new research management system. You might have heard colleagues talking about Symplectic Elements for a while now – the supplier (Symplectic Ltd) first visited BU to demonstrate the application in August 2009. I’m pleased to announced that we have now signed the contract with Symplectic and are in discussions with the supplier to determine the implementation plan. The aim is to have the system up and running this autumn.

Symplectic Elements is already used by lots of other UK universities, including Imperial College, Oxford, Exeter, Cambridge, UCL and Plymouth.

So what is Symplectic Elements and what benefits will it bring to BU? Symplectic Elements is a research management system. It will not replace any of our existing BU systems (such as BURO or RED) but it will link to them and join them together, sharing data between the systems. This means that BU staff will be able to add information to Symplectic Elements and it will be used in multiple systems. You will also be able to access research information from a single place. A single point of data entry will enable research information (such as publications data) to be automatically formatted and reused in other forums, such as in BU’s open access repository (BURO) and the BU staff profile webpages, without the need for duplicate or additional data entry. You will also be able to query data that appears to be missing or incorrect.

Symplectic Elements will provide academics with a simple ‘dashboard’ from which to view and manage their research information. This will also help when BU begins compiling data to meet the requirements of the REF.

How will Symplectic Elements link with the existing systems?

  • Symplectic Elements will link to our Research and Enterprise Database (RED) so you can see your current bids and projects. From within Symplectic you will also be able to link yourself to the PGR students you supervise.
  • It will link to BURO so that your research outputs are entered into the repository.
  • It will also link to a number of external publication databases (including Web of Science and Scopus) and automatically search these for your publications. When it identifies a paper it thinks might be yours it will send you an email and ask you to confirm it is your paper. If it is then all you will need to do is to tick ‘yes’ and Symplectic will create a record of your publication automatically. You will simply need to add a full-text copy of the paper (copyright permitting) and it will be uploaded into BURO.
  • Symplectic Elements will link to the new content management system and you will be able to choose which information is used on your staff profile webpage.

Timeframe for implementation: A broad steering group of representatives from across BU’s Schools and Professional Services has been formed to help feed into and guide the system’s implementation. A core project management group is currently overseeing the day-to-day tasks and will manage the initial data integration and checking. A meeting with the suppliers is scheduled for the end of the month. The system is due to go live in autumn 2011.

Further updates about Symplectic Elements will be posted on the BU Research Blog in due course!