SciVal November Release

Funding is a major priority for research institutions but finding and securing grants is a time-consuming and increasingly competitive process. To succeed you need to gain insight into the complicated funding landscape, discover hidden opportunities and make informed decisions.

It comes down to having the right information – the right insights – to select the bids best suited to researchers’ areas of expertise.

Elsevier’s Funding Institutional offers access to that vital information with over 21K active, multidisciplinary grants from a wide array of public and private funders from around the world, over 6.7M awards and over 5,300 funder profiles.

CERIF is the European standard for research information management maintained by the euroCRIS non-profit association in the Netherlands. CERIF exists to ensure that research information may be shared, exchanged and mined across Current Research Information Systems or CRISs of various kinds including institutional, subject-specific, regional, national and funder ones. The way this is achieved is via the definition of a harmonised relational entity data model that covers the main conceptual elements associated to research. People (researchers), organisations (institutions) and research projects are the core entities of the CERIF data model, to which a number of secondary ones are connected such as research publications, research instruments and facilities or research data and patents.

The presentation will describe the CERIF data model and show several of its applications to improve system interoperability, including the integration with the European OpenAIRE Open Science infrastructure.

With research funding waning, and competition increasing, institutions need every advantage to secure research funding. And with an average of 38 days’ work required to develop a proposal, increasing efficiencies and saving time are optimal. Learn how, working together, Pure and Funding Institutional offer institutions a new solution to the old problem of finding funding opportunities with the best chances for success.

Taipei Medical University’s Academic Hub / Pure Experts research system was established in January 2016 with the President’s support in order to underpin strategic planning goals. Up to now the system has cataloged 1,322 experts’ profiles including full-time professors and visiting staff from the Taipei Medical University(TMU) Healthcare System. The total number of the platform page views has reached around 3 million.

In the past year, we even received 90,000 page views a month. Through deep integration with SciVal from 2018, articles under the Pure group structure from organizations such as colleges, research centers, and entire universities, can be further analyzed using SciVal. In addition, the research metrics enable TMU to support fact-based decision making and faulty performance evaluation. The goal of the research management system is to boost TMU’s research visibility and propel international collaboration with TMU’s researchers.

This presentation sets out how we promote TMU’s Academic Hub / Pure Experts Research System to improve platform visibility, data integrity, and data accuracy. We accomplished this in a variety of ways, by conducting various activities such as training courses, international conferences, video recordings, and press releases. Furthermore, we commissioned a survey questionnaire to collect user behaviors including access channels, frequency of use, the purpose of use, system functional requirements, and system satisfaction. We also executed an analysis based on researcher's needs to evaluate the system user experience from a researcher's point of view. This will help us to plan our future applications of the system.

At Monash, managing Pure operations involves continually interacting with the changes in both Pure and other University systems as well as changes in business processes whilst keeping the system operational and up to date. In this session we will look into how we manage Pure, including the various integrations of Pure with upstream and downstream systems, the automations enabled to assist with user access management and the extensive testing processes followed as part of the release management.

We will also discuss some of the infrastructure improvements that have enabled us to have more flexible Pure environments, thereby enabling the business to rapidly onboard new processes and modules, without interrupting other ongoing projects within Pure. Monash University is one of the leading universities in Australia with over 86,000 students and 9,000 FTE staff. Research at Monash occurs over 10 Faculties, with approximately 10,000 outputs published per year, over 3500 funding applications submitted per annum and in 2019 were awarded the 3rd highest amount of research income in Australia from the 2 major national funding bodies.

The arrival of COVID-19 threw changes at many of us; a significant change being no longer able to interact with people directly and the rise of the "Zoom" meeting and virtual interactions.

Whilst this may have been a challenge for other Pure User Groups, the Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) Pure User Group have been meeting virtually for over 3 years.

Participaing in virtual meetings and managing a user group meeting virtually can have challenges such as getting user participation, allowing robust discussion, determining consensus on issues and managing the mute button.

This presentation will explore the challenges and offer some of the strategies which have been used by the ANZ Pure User Group to both encourage participation and allow for effective management of virtual meetings.

The University of Western Australia originally acquired Pure in 2014 as a Repository and source of truth for publication information. Since then, it has steadily expanded to include a greater breadth of information on researchers and has replaced the University’s contact directory for staff profile information.

The Research Office and Faculties in the University of Western Australia are increasingly relying on Pure to identify researchers by expertise and research area. Fingerprints have been a popular way to identify researchers in specific fields and for finding collaborators and mentors, as well as more recently, for matching researchers with funding opportunities.

Our team has been working closely with Elsevier to improve fingerprint aggregation in our researchers’ profiles. We will outline the advantages and limitations of using fingerprints.

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the submission rate to scholarly journals increased abnormally (e.g., more than 90% in Elsevier’s health & medicine journals). Given that most academics have been forced to work from home, the competing demands for home-schooling, child and other care duties might have penalised the scientific productivity of women. To test this hypothesis, we looked at submitted manuscripts and peer review activities for all Elsevier journals between February and May 2018-2020, including data on almost 6 million academics. Results showed that women submitted proportionally fewer manuscripts than men during the COVID-19 lockdown months. This deficit was especially pronounced among women in more advanced stages of their career. The rate of peer-review invitation acceptance showed a less pronounced gender pattern, with the exception of health & medicine, where women were also less keen to accept reviewing. Our findings indicate that the pandemic has already created cumulative advantages for men.

Performance measurement is a core driver for an organisational growth and can serve as an early institutional health check system. While the concept of a dashboard has been widely used in the private sector for years, the interest in business intelligence, data analytics, and data visualisation in relation to measuring individual academic performance expectations grew just recently.

This session will shed a light on Total Research Explorer (T-Rex) designed to monitor the individual progress against Performance Expectations for Academic Staff (PEAS) at the University of Canberra. We will focus on the dashboard structure, user experience design, and integration with external dynamic and static data sources.

Special attention will be devoted to the integration with the Pure Research Management System highlighting the potential issues and roadmap for future development.

The interoperability of persistent identifiers (PIDs) like ORCID and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) like Pure manifests a global-scale research infrastructure, which enables trusted connections and serves as the foundation for Open Science. This presentation will give an overview on ORCID and Pure collaborations, specifically how the Pure community in the APAC region can benefit from adopting PIDs like ORCID to support the principles of Open Science.

Making science truly open relies on improving data quality and transparency, so that not only can researchers easily share their work, but research institutes can easily acquire the most accurate and up-to-date research information in an open and interoperable way. Such interoperability requires a robust, global-scale infrastructure that enables linkages between researchers, research institutions, publishers, and funding organizations.

The use of PIDs—like ORCID—along with a CRIS—such as Elsevier’s Pure—supports the research community in collecting, managing, analyzing and showcasing data about the research conducted at an institution. This is realized by research institutions asserting affiliations to researchers’ ORCID records, exporting other data to researchers’ ORCID records, such as other identifiers (like Scopus Author ID) or research outputs. Research institutes can collect information about their researchers like awards or works connected to the ORCID Registry by publishers or funders to curate data in Pure. Integrating ORCID iDs into Pure reduces administrative burden and allows research institutes to reliably link researchers with their contributions and affiliations, and to synchronize data between Pure and multiple platforms.

We constantly look at how to improve the metrics available to you. Authorship analyses and contribution to the UN SDGs are two such improvements happening in 2020.

In many disciplines, different types of authorship are indicated on the publication and can be used as a proxy of the researcher's contribution in the research done on the publication.

This session will introduce the new authorship metrics on SciVal, along with the SDG Research Mapping Initiative which is currently trying to improve the document to SDG mapping and builds upon last year's presentation.

Funders and publishers increasingly require research data related to publications to be shared openly. The University of Western Australia uses the Pure platform to provide a functional data publishing service to our researchers.

Our team within the University Library migrated research data from the open source DSpace platform to Pure in 2016. We were the first Australian institution to implement the Dataset Module within Pure and the journey has been has been somewhat different to that experienced by perhaps Europe or the United States.

Challenges have included DOI minting, harvesting metadata into Research Data Australia (RDA), bulk importing records via XML and adding externally-published dataset metadata into Pure. We are excited to present how we overcame our challenges including leveraging new developments in Pure (e.g. Data Monitor) to to gain a clear picture of UWA data being produced, enhancing the visibility of staff profiles and via RDA.

2020 will go down as a year to remember! This has forced us all to adapt and change. How do you stay connected while being physically disconnected? The ANZ Community Portal was step-up by Elsevier with this challenge in mind.

Its purpose to is to provide the ANZ community a place where experts can be found, existing research can be discovered, and research institutions can be highlighted. COVID impact is much wider that just the medical aspects, let's combine the individuals, work together and show case them in one location.

This presentation is about the challenges faced in setting this up, how it has been used and next planned steps. Research in its collaborative nature. Developing systems like this can only help to make that process easier.

Traditionally we have relied a lot on "classic reporting" when presenting and disseminating data from Pure to a given recipient or audience. The usual approach has been Excel sheets or .pdf's combined with the standardized way data is presented on the Pure Portal. Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with an Excel report. Being able to extract data from Pure through reports has great value - but let's face it, it is not necessarily the most interesting way to present the data to people. Same goes for the Pure Portal - it's fast, reliable and requires little attention, but it won't blow the audience away, and invite them to explore or engage with the data.

This presentation will cover some of the new ways we have tried to visualize our data and bring it more to life through services such as Flourish, Google Data Studio, Sway and more. I will show examples of visualizations, and other new ways our Pure data is being put to use in different contexts beyond reporting and portal. Our goal has been to 1: make the data more visually appealing and interesting to explore and 2: make the data interactive, compared to a static webpage or document.

The presentation will also cover some of the challenges we have faced and still face in order to make our data appealing. Hopefully it will inspire others who are interested in visualizations of (Pure) data, and give the Pure team at Elsevier some good ideas for future versions of Pure.

Research management as a discipline is becoming of increasing importance, as universities focus on growing their research activity. The world of research funding is heavily competitive and the realities of COVID-19 will leave universities struggling to do more with less. Despite the importance of this work, it is often loosely defined, encompassing a number of support activities around research, with inconsistent terminology, sometimes even within the same organisation.

This presentation will showcase the ongoing work at QUT to define a reference model that provides a standardised way to discuss and evaluate these activities. This model has been developed as part of an iterative action design research approach, working with academics from the Business Process Management discipline at QUT. This approach will be detailed in this presentation along with the validation that has now been conducted with research management experts at research organisations across the sector.

The elements of the model will be broken down as well as real world use cases where the model is currently being applied to better manage the field of research management.

Due to the large amounts of research information they contain, institutional research information management systems or CRIS (Current Research Information Systems), are uniquely placed to support research activity at universities and research centres in various different ways. One of the areas where this support for the institutional research can be most effective is the implementation of Open Science.

With its current emphasis on the twin goal of Open Access and Research Data Management implementation, Open Science sits particularly well in a research information management landscape where a wealth of data is being collected on institutional publications and data. Evidence for the usefulness of CRIS systems for the implementation of Open Science was provided via an example for the institutional Pure CRIS at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow in the paper "The role of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) in supporting Open Science implementation : the case of Strathclyde" published in 2019 in a special issue of the ITlib journal devoted to these institutional systems, https://doi.org/10.25610/itlib-2018-0003.

While retaining the Pure example at Strathclyde University as a benchmark, the presentation will expand and generalise the findings of this 2019 paper showing how different institutions use various CRIS systems – occasionally including national- or regional-level ones – for the implementation of specific aspects of Open Science and Innovation.

What does the future intersection between IRs and CRIS/RIMS look like? What are the prevailing views on how the two contribute value to the institution? How would users like to manage both systems even more effectively together? And what can Elsevier do to advance the value that its IR system, Digital Commons, and its CRIS/RIMS system, Pure, can deliver together?

This talk will shine a light on each of these questions by presenting results from surveys and interviews conducted with institutions subscribing to both Digital Commons and Pure. Analysis and insights reflecting the perspectives of administrators of both systems will be shared. And the latest outlook on integration between the two platforms, building off of the insights from recent beta tests, will be highlighted.

In 2019, we surveyed the database systems for setting up complete research, teaching, and service records for our faculties. In addition, we planned to use the database to understand performance of research and development of our faculties, departments, colleges, and the whole university. Further, it was considered to publish some database about research achievements to promote our faculties’ research and development results. The promotion could help to raise reputation of our university. The Pure system was selected as the main database system for setting the complete recording system due to many excellent functions, such as its portal websites for promotion and its statistical reports. On the other hand, we had several other database systems that have to be integrated with the main database system. In the past year, we set up the main database system – Pure and integrate with most of our on campus databases. We will share our experiences on the integration of on campus database and on how we use Pure to benchmark performances of research and development for each faculty and for institutes. The system provides complete records of our faculties’ achievements and it help to analyze our fields and directions. It provides useful information for policy makers in the college.

An overview is provided of how technology and a Quality Management Framework is being employed to measure and further improve data quality in Scopus. Data accuracy (both precision and completeness) is critical in the process of informing institutional research decisions and when one reviews an institutions expertise and capabilities. While Pure supports 20 different direct data source imports, Scopus is the most-used source of data imported into Pure instances across all regions globally. To enable further quality improvements at Scopus and other services, Elsevier recently acquired Parity Computing Inc., a profiling technology provider.

Presenters will share
a Total Quality Measurement & Management (TQM&M) framework employed in the Scopus data teams to think about data quality, to define quality, and measure it
findings of data quality sampled from across the Scopus corpus (and segmented by region), and change over time
further Scopus plans of relevance to RIM/CRIS consumers of Scopus data.