Worldwide Cancer Research

Daniel Hook, one of the co-founders of Symplectic and now CEO of Digital Science, reflects on the past 20 years of growth and change at Symplectic – and what makes it such a special partner within the research community.

Twenty years is a long time in tech but a short time in the world of research. There are other, perhaps more appropriate measures by which to measure the age of Symplectic: in UK terms, Symplectic is ‘three REFs’ old, from a New Zealand perspective it is just two PBRFs, and in an Australian context it is four (and a bit) ERAs old. From a software development perspective, Symplectic is six major versions old. From a client perspective, it is more than 120 installations old. From a personal perspective, it is two CEOs old – indeed, around Christmas this year, I will become the second-longest serving CEO of Symplectic, having moved into the Digital Science leadership team in 2015 and handed the reins of Symplectic over into the capable hands of Jonathan Breeze.

As with almost any 20-year-old, this one, which was started by four friends who happened to share an office while doing their PhDs, has grown so as to be almost completely unrecognisable. And yet, there are things that were important to us when we founded the company 20 years ago that remain at the heart of what we do now. I like to think that there are two guiding principles in what Symplectic does: firstly, whatever we do, we do it collaboratively; secondly, we want to save people time. There are other things that flow from this: bringing an academic perspective; helping people to make better decisions; ensuring that data are re-used; making sure that we preserve key aspects of choice in how users of Elements are able to work with the data that it contains; interoperability between systems and so on. At the core each of these things is an expression of those two guiding principles.

Setting collaboration at the centre of Symplectic’s world has created a very special ethos in the company, as both those inside the company and those who work with Symplectic’s team will attest. Symplectic’s story is not just about those of us who founded the company or those of us who have been part of the team – it is a story that is shared with Symplectic’s wider community. There are simply too many people to name who have played pivotal roles in making Symplectic the company that it is today. I know this because, in preparation for this blog, I tried to write such a list and found myself with more than 50 names of people simply from my time as CEO in the first ten years of Symplectic. And, that list specifically did not include the many colleagues and friends who were actually part the Symplectic team itself over that period. I can only imagine that Jonathan Breeze, my successor, has a list at least as long as the company has expanded significantly under his tenure. All these contributors have made Symplectic what it is today. 

Symplectic enjoys a special level of collaboration with its clients, partners, friends, and colleagues. So many over the years have taken a long view – not solely focusing on their own project or installation but giving their time and knowledge generously. This has not only created a company and a piece of software, but also a shared store of deep domain knowledge. Every relationship has gone toward ‘paying it forward’ so that the broader Symplectic community benefits from the innovations and ideas of each participant. When once, in the early phase of Symplectic’s development around 2008, a perceptive UK-based client observed, “You’re really just centralising development funding from many universities so that you can give us a great product and keep it moving forward in a way that we can afford”, they were not wrong.

Our second focus of saving people time sits as a key part of this collaborative relationship. In that regard, Symplectic has moved from serving a single institution in 2003 to being fortunate enough to collaborate with institutions around the world to help them save time for their researchers.

Symplectic’s work is trusted around the world, saving time every day for more than 500,000 academics and administrators in 18 countries. The clients of Symplectic hold more than 8.8m distinct publications sourced from different data sources, saving academic and administrative time every time an article is added to their Symplectic Elements system, full text is deposited, or data is reused in other systems to inform decisions, help annual reviews or advertise the expertise of colleagues to potential partners around the world. With the help of Dimensions, I estimate that:

• Just over 7% of global annual output is recorded by organisations in a Symplectic Elements system in an automated way that minimises the time to rekey research metadata records.
• 23% of global green open access articles are associated with at least one Symplectic Elements instance, saving time for academics to deposit their work into institutional repositories.
• 17.5% of global citations land on articles stored in Symplectic Elements instances, while 15.5% of Nature papers are captured in Elements instances.
• Approximately 64% of articles associated with Symplectic’s clients have an Altmetric mention (compared to a global average of 27%).
• 72.5% of New Zealand’s research article output is captured in a Symplectic Elements system, as well as 74% of funder-acknowledging publications, and almost 81% of New Zealand’s University-produced research.

It has been an honour to work with the Symplectic team over the last 20 years. To see their progress, their dedication, and their spirit. As you see, they have carved out a unique path and make a real impact in the world with the people that they support. Here’s to the next 20! 

And, of course, to borrow a phrase… Vive la Symplectic! 

This post was originally published on the Symplectic website here.

While the global picture of Open Access remains something of a patchwork (see our recent blog post The Changing Landscape of Open Access Compliance), trends are nevertheless moving in broadly the same direction, with the past decade seeing a move globally from 70% of all publishing being closed access to 54% being open access. 

The White House OSTP’s new memo (aka the Nelson Memo) will see this trend advance rapidly in the United States, stipulating that federally-funded publications and associated datasets should be made publicly available without embargo.

In this blog post, Symplectic‘s Kate Byrne and Figshare‘s Andrew Mckenna-Foster start to unpack what the Nelson Memo means, along with some of the impacts, considerations and challenges that research institutions and librarians will need to consider in the coming months.

Demystifying the Nelson Memo’s recommendations

The focus of the memo is upon ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research. 

The first clause of the memo is focused on working with the funders to ensure that they have policies in place to provide embargo-free, public access to research. 

The second clause encourages the development of transparent procedures to ensure scientific and research integrity is maintained in public access policies. This is a complex and interesting space, which goes beyond the remit of what we would perhaps traditionally think of as ‘Open Access’ to incorporate elements such as transparency of data, conflicts of interest, funding, and reproducibility (the latter of which is of particular interest to our sister company Ripeta, who are dedicated to building trust in science by benchmarking reproducibility in research).  

The third clause recommends that federal agencies coordinate with the OSTP in order to ensure equitable delivery of federally-funded research results in data. While the first clause mentions making supporting data available alongside publications, this clause takes a broader stance toward sharing results. 

What does this mean for institutions and faculty?

The Nelson memo introduces a clear set of challenges for research institutions, research managers, and librarians, who now need to consider how to put in place internal workflows and guidance that will enable faculty to easily identify eligible research and make it openly available, how to support multiple pathways to open access, and how to best engage and incentivize researchers and faculty. 

However, the OSTP has made very clear that this is not in fact a mandate, but rather a non-binding set of recommendations. While this certainly relieves some of the potential immediate pressure and panic around getting systems and processes in place, it is clear that what this move does represent is the direction of travel that has been communicated to federal funders. 

Funders will look at the Nelson Memo when reviewing their own policies, and seek alignment when setting their own policy requirements that drive action for faculty members across the US. So while the memo does not in itself mandate compliance for institutions, universities, and research organizations, it will have a direct impact on the activities faculty are being asked to complete – increasing the need for institutions to offer faculty services and support to help them easily comply with their funders requirements.

How have funders responded so far? 

We are already seeing clear indications that funders are embracing the recommendations and preparing next steps. Rapidly after the announcement, the NIH published a statement of support for the policy, noting that it has “long championed principles of transparency and accessibility in NIH-funded research and supports this important step by the Biden Administration”, and over the coming months will “work with interagency partners and stakeholders to revise its current Public Access Policy to enable researchers, clinicians, students, and the public to access NIH research results immediately upon publication”. 

Similarly, the USDA tweeted their support for the guidance, noting that “rapid public access to federally-funded research & data can drive data-driven decisions & innovation that are critical in our fast-changing world.”

How big could the impact be?

While it will take some time for funders to begin to publish their updated OA Policies, there have been some early studies which seek to assess how many publications could potentially fall under such policies. 

A recent preprint by Eric Schares of Iowa State University [Impact of the 2022 OSTP Memo: A Bibliometric Analysis of U.S. Federally Funded Publications, 20217-2021] used data from Dimensions to identify and analyse publications with federal funding sources. Schares found that: 

• 1.32 million publications in the US were federally funded between 2017-2021, representing 33% of all US research outputs in the same period. 
• 32% of federally funded publications were not openly available to the public in 2021 (compared to 38% of worldwide publications during the same period). 

Schares’ study included 237 federal funding agencies – due to the removal of the $100m threshold, many more funders now fall under the Nelson memo than under the previous 2013 Holdren memo. This makes it likely that disciplines who previously were not impacted will now find themselves grappling with public access requirements.

In Schares’ visualization here, where each dot represents a research institution, we can see that two main groupings emerge. The first is a smaller group made up of the National Laboratories. They publish a smaller number of papers overall, but are heavily federally funded (80-90% of their works). The second group is a much larger cluster, representing Universities across the US. Those organisations have 30–60% of their publications being federally-funded, but building from a much larger base number of publications – meaning that they will likely have a lot of faculty members who will now need support.

Where do faculty members need support?

According to the 2022 State of Open Data Report, institutions and libraries have a particularly essential role to play in meeting new top-down initiatives, not only by providing sufficient infrastructure but also support, training and guidance for researchers. It is clear from the findings of the report that the work of compliance is wearing on researchers, with 35% of respondents citing lack of time as reason for not adhering to data management plans and 52% citing finding time to curate data as the area they need the most help and support with. 72% of researchers indicated they would rely on an internal resource (either colleagues, the Library or the Research Office) were they to require help with managing or making their data openly available.

How to start?

Institutions who invest now in building capacity in these areas to support open access and data sharing for researchers will be better prepared for the OSTP’s 2025 deadline, helping to avoid any last-minute scramble to support their researchers in meeting this guidance.

Beginning to think about enabling open access can be a daunting task, particularly for institutions who don’t yet have internal workflows or appropriate infrastructure set up, so we recommend breaking down your approach into more manageable chunks: 

1. Understand your own Open Access landscape 

• Find out where your researchers are publishing and what OA pathways they are currently using. You can do this by reviewing your scholarly publishing patterns and the OA status of those works.
• Explore the data you have for your own repositories – not only your own existing data sets, but also those from other sources such as data aggregators or tools like Dimensions.
• Begin to overlay publishing data with grants data, to benchmark where you are now and work to identify the kinds of drivers that your researchers are likely to see in the future. 

2. Review your system capabilities

• Is your repository ready for both publications and data?
• Do you have effective monitoring and reporting capabilities that will help you track engagement and identify areas where your community may need more support? Are your systems researcher-friendly; how quickly and easily can a researcher make their work openly available??

3. Consider how you will support your research ecosystem 

• Identify how you plan to support and incentivize researchers, considering how you will provide guidance about compliant ways of making work openly available, as well as practical support where relevant.
• Plan communication points between internal stakeholders (e.g. Research Office, Library, IT) to create a joined-up approach that will provide a shared and seamless experience to your researchers.
• Review institutional policies and procedures relating to publishing and open access, considering where you are at present and where you’d like to get to.

How can Digital Science help? 

Symplectic Elements was the first commercially available research information management system to be “open access aware”, connecting to institutional digital repositories in order to enable frictionless open access deposit for publications and accompanying datasets. Since 2009 through initial integration with DSpace – later expanding our repository support to Figshare, EPrints, Hyrax, and custom home-grown systems – we have partnered with and guided many research institutions around the globe as they work to evolve and mature their approach to open access. We have deep experience in building out tools and processes which will help universities meet mandates set by national governments or funders, report on fulfilment and compliance, and engage researchers in increasing levels of deposit. 

Our sister company Figshare is a leading provider of cloud repository software and has been working for over a decade to make research outputs, of all types, more discoverable and reusable and lower the barriers of access. Meeting and exceeding many of the ‘desirable characteristics’ set out by the OSTP themselves for repositories, Figshare is the repository of choice for over 100 universities and research institutions looking to ensure their researchers are compliant with the rising tide of funder policies.

Below is an example of the type of Open Access dashboard that can be configured and run using the various collated and curated scholarly data held within Symplectic Elements.

In this example, we are using Dimensions as a data source, building on data from Unpaywall about the open access status of works within an institution’s Elements system. Using the data visualizations within this dashboard, you can start to look at open access trends over time, such as the different sorts of open access pathways being used, and how that pattern changes when you look across different publishers or different journals, or for different departments within your organization. By gaining this powerful understanding of where you are today, you can begin to think about how to best prioritise your efforts for tomorrow as you continue to mature your approach to open access. 

You might find yourself at Level 1 right now where you have a publications repository along with some metadata, and you’re able to track a number of deposits and do some basic reporting, but there are a number of ways that you can build this up over time to create a truly integrated OA solution. By bringing together publications and data repositories and integrating them within a research management solution, you can enter a space where you can monitor proactively, with an embedded engagement and compliance strategy across all publications and data. 

For more information or if you’d like to set up time to speak to the Digital Science team about how Symplectic Elements or Figshare for Institutions can support and guide you in your journey to a fully embedded and mature Open Access strategy, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.

This blog post was originally published on the Symplectic website.

For nearly three decades the UN has been bringing together countries from around the globe to hold climate summits on how to address the growing climate crisis. Last year’s Conference of the Parties (COP) in Glasgow (delayed by a year due to the pandemic) took major steps toward addressing the climate crisis, but failed to deliver the national commitments required to together limit warming globally to 1.5C laid out by the Paris Agreement.

After a year of extreme weather events, from record heatwaves to disastrous flooding, this year’s COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, will be crucial as the world seeks to take steps together toward mitigating and preventing the worst impacts of climate change. 

A UN Climate Change ‘Global Innovation Hub’ (UGIH) will be held during COP27, accessible digitally for the first time to enable greater collaboration, and is set to “ratchet up the scale and effectiveness of innovation in tackling climate change and help deliver on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals”. The UGIH aims to accelerate action across both the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda. 

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are designed to be a blueprint for achieving a better and more sustainable future for all by addressing the global challenges we face. The SDGs are at the centre of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and represent an urgent call for action by all countries – both developed and developing – in global partnership. They recognise that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.

Tracking and reporting on SDGs in Elements 

Since SDGs were first introduced, there has been a growing vested interest in tracking, analysing and showcasing the ways in which researchers are contributing to achieving these goals, and in demonstrating global research impact at an institutional level. This can be clearly seen in the increasing numbers of institutions participating in the Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings, which in 2022 showed a 23% increase from 2021. THE Impact Rankings are the only global performance tables that assess universities against SDGs, and currently show participation across 110 countries and regions.   

This year we introduced simple but powerful functionality into Elements, allowing institutions to track which research outputs, publications, and activities connect back to the 17 SDGs via use of a new label scheme. SDG labels can be applied to any items captured in Elements (eg. publications, grants, professional & teaching activities and records of impact). 

Labels can be applied manually, in bulk via the Elements API, or automatically through our Dimensions integration. Dimensions uses machine-learning to automatically analyse publications and grants, and map them to relevant SDGs. Dimensions maps SDG labels to over 12.9 million publications and hundreds of thousands of grants, with more records being analysed and mapped all the time. These labels are now automatically harvested into Elements together with other metadata on Dimensions records. Those who are licensed to use Dimensions as a data source can further exploit the benefit of having SDG labels harvested and applied to records automatically.

Read our Digital Science report on Contextualising Sustainable Development Research.

Once collected, SDG data can be used for powerful reporting purposes, whether at an individual, school, or institutional level. We have introduced stock dashboards to support initial reporting on SDG labels. These tools can help research institutions demonstrate which individuals, schools or groups are focused most on specific SDGs, analyse gaps and areas of further necessary investment, and even demonstrate return on investment for funding.

Labels can also be applied to user profiles and surfaced in public profiles within the Discovery Module add-on to Elements, helping external researchers, members of the press and other stakeholders identify specialists working toward particular sustainability goals (see examples of public profiles showcasing SDG labelling at Oklahoma State University or Lincoln University). This can help drive discoverability of research, open up opportunities for greater collaboration and innovation, and support the public understanding and availability of science by connecting the media to knowledgeable scientific sources. 

Users can search and filter by specific SDGs they are interested in to find researchers specialising in that field, while the researchers themselves can showcase their work within their own profiles. 

Applying the SDG framework to Elements facilitates and supports both internal and external collaboration and innovation, advancing global efforts to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

SDG Case Study: Carnegie Mellon University 

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private, global research university which stands among the world’s most renowned educational institutions. CMU acquired Elements in 2017 and now uses the platform across a wide range of use cases, including “service tracking, faculty annual reviews, publications and monitoring, public directory, custom reporting, data visualization and analysis, data feeds to external websites, open access research and scholarship, data migration from historical systems, researcher identity management, and mapping faculty research to Sustainable Development Goals”. Read more.

During 2021, the University Libraries worked alongside the Provost Office’s Sustainability Initiative to conduct the Sustainable Development Goal mapping with a set of early adopters.

A recent news post on the Carnegie Mellon libraries blog on their ongoing expansion of Elements across campus explains how Director of Sustainability Initiatives Alexandra Hiniker utilised Elements to support faculty in thinking critically about how their work aligns with the 2030 Agenda.

“One thing I’ve heard consistently from students, faculty, staff, and external partners that I work with here in Pittsburgh, across the country, and around the world, is that they want to know what our CMU community is doing on the range of sustainable development goals that cover everything from poverty and hunger, to good health and wellbeing, peaceful, just and strong institutions, reducing inequalities, and of course, climate action,” explains Hiniker in a recent video interview published by the university. “There’s so much great work going on across CMU but it’s hard to pull out all of that information, and share it with all of these different people who are interested in collaboration.

“As part of my role linking students, staff, and faculty across the campus to sustainability efforts, I heard from them that the most important thing was to connect to different parts of the university to which they usually didn’t have access,” Hiniker explained. “Elements is a way for people to quickly access information about what researchers are doing, so that they can help contribute to finding solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges.”

Elements is now providing a centralized space for CMU’s campus researchers to record which SDGs are associated with their research outputs and other academic activities. The Libraries’ Elements reporting and data visualization team worked with the Sustainability Initiatives Office to build reporting dashboards which surface data on how faculty initiatives and research across campus are supporting specific SDGs. 

You can hear more from Hiniker directly in this short interview:

Find out more or get support

Elements can help you track and report on how your researchers are contributing towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as we all work towards achieving a better and more sustainable future for all. Not only does this make participation in the THE Impact Rankings far simpler, it also helps you demonstrate your commitment to global progress to researchers and faculty, prospective students, funders, and other key stakeholders. If you’d like to get in touch to learn more about Elements, or if you’re a current client who’d like more information on how to integrate Dimensions as a data source, or surface SDG labels in public profiles, please get in touch to find out more. 

The Digital Science Consultancy team can also produce tailored analysis for non-profits, governments, funders, research institutions and STEM publishers to inform strategy to meet organisational goals. We can help you relate the influence and impact that your organisation has to research on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Globally, the past decade has seen a move from 70% of all publishing being closed access to 54% being open access. In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed science publishing and necessitated a huge acceleration in transitioning to Open Access (OA) models, driven by a need for speed in publishing and an accompanying growth in preprints. The even more recent memo from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will see this trend advance rapidly in the United States, with not only federally funded publications themselves but associated datasets being required to be made publicly available without embargo.

In this blog post, Symplectic‘s Tzu-I Liao examines global shifts in approach to Open Access, and discusses how Symplectic plans to continue to evolve Elements’ functionality to build in more flexibility and support for multiple OA pathways. 

Tracking global trends – and differences – in the OA landscape

Figure 1 shows a dramatic 10x increase of OA policies adopted between 2005 and 2022 by institutions, according to ROARMAP. Numbers of policies adopted by funders increased from 19 in 2005 to 142 to 2022. We are excited to see the growing effort in making research more open – but on the other hand, as research organisations are required to give account of how the funded projects are compliant and managed efficiently, we now are faced with a much bigger range of requirements and criteria to monitor within Symplectic Elements. 

Interestingly, amidst the changing landscape of OA requirements, the latest updates to government funder policies suggest trends of similar requirements globally. For example, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Government of the UK that directs research and innovation funding, updated its OA policy in 2020, mandating all funded research outputs be made open immediately upon publication without any embargo. Comparably, in August 2022 the OSTP within the US government issued guidance for federal agencies to set up their own OA policy to make funded research available to the public immediately once published, permitting no delay.

On the other side of the world the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the main authority of the Australian Government responsible for medical research, also revised its policy in September 2022 and listed these same criteria for compliance. These funders also underline the importance of making research data open. Both UKRI and NHMRC prescribed the reuse licence to be applied to the outputs. While it is reassuring to see major funders moving towards similar directions, the OA landscape in front of us is still full of uncertainties.

While many policies point to similar criteria, much more variables now need to be taken into consideration when calculating compliance. Table 1 below demonstrates the difference of policy requirements between three major funders in different regions: both UKRI and NIH turn to making publications available immediately, while ARC retains the option of embargo; while UKRI and ARC pay more attention to metadata and research data, it is not yet specified in NIH’s policy.

Authority	UKRI (UK)	NIH (USA)	ARC (Australia)
Mandate (articles)	Version of Record immediately available upon publication or Accepted Manuscript deposited in repository	Must be submitted to NIHMS upon acceptance & publicly available on PubMed Central	Should be open access within 12 months of publication
Mandate (metadata)	Must be used on deposit platforms	N/A	Must be public within 3 months of publication
Mandate (data)	Need to have data accessibility statement	N/A	Open access is encouraged

On top of the divergent paths for making research output ‘open’ or ‘publicly available’ (which are not always clearly defined), many policies also mention requirements about metadata and/or research data. However, clearer guidance on these areas are yet to be published. There are more policies encouraging the adoption of Gold OA pathway, but hybrid models and transformative deals make monitoring increasingly complicated. Some funders specify that outputs and metadata need to be deposited on platforms meeting certain requirements, although there is no comprehensive list of such platforms. 

Monitoring open access with Elements so far

Currently Symplectic Elements already helps institutions support and streamline open access workflows. With our flexible repository tools, administrators can customise harvest and deposit processes for the institutional repositories and use them as data sources to maintain an accurate representation of the outputs and minimise duplicates and efforts. 

At the same time, our OA Monitor module focuses on supporting an oversight of the institution’s activities for green OA. This involves keeping an eye on very detailed metadata about different types of publications with different funding sources and potentially multiple authors of different statuses. Our OA Monitor module supports defining an OA Policy: from what groups of users and publications are included in the policy, to detailed instructions about what compliance means. You can exclude inactive users or publications with embargo requests. We offer a complex algorithm to check compliance based on deposit deadlines, embargo period, deposit file versions etc. With the defined policy, users can set up prompts for researchers at various steps of workflows to deposit full text to the institutional repository for publications covered by the policy. The goal is to provide users with actionable information about how they can increase the proportion of deposited works. 

How OA changes impact upon Elements

As all these different mandates emerge, there are more criteria and more specifications at different levels that need attention. Our current approach to focus on monitoring the Green OA pathway may see more gaps going forward.

For example, the updated UKRI policy now no longer allows any embargo for the Green OA pathway– all outputs should be made open by the time of publication. To be compliant, there are no more grace periods (as for REF submissions) or any embargo that could serve as a buffer zone. This could mean that the deposit monitoring workflow likely needs to start much earlier in the publishing cycle. Alternatively, institutions might also see more researchers considering taking the Gold OA pathway, and thus need to monitor such activities more rigorously.

In other words, the sets of data points to capture and/or curate in order to fulfil the institutional needs in the OA monitor are now different.

More and more institutions feel the need to set up their own policies: partly responding to the funder mandates, partly trying to simplify the workflows required for widening needs. More stakeholders of various levels and focuses need to be brought onboard, with wider impacts on more parts of an organisation. 

The work entailed to support researchers and departments to be as compliant as possible has also changed significantly. Perhaps you want to help researchers choose an open journal to publish in, prompting researcher to deposit the right version of the work with the right licence together with the research dataset, and also include a statement about data availability or handle support with Author Processing Charges (APCs) or copyright retention etc

All these lead to more complex and institution- or even funder-specific monitoring workflows. We see institutions develop very specific reporting needs around these processes, some of which can be fulfilled partly by custom reports. These reports work well for specific needs, but are often less flexible and require more maintenance effort. While our OA Monitor and reports cater very well to the current scope of monitoring, there are some limitations because of the single-policy framework. Not all OA Monitor concepts, like first deposit date or reuse licences, are in the Reporting database – which means we are not always utilising everything we already have curated. 

Responding to OA changes with Elements

As the landscape of Open Access continues to evolve, with national and even regional disparities and a growing proliferation of pathways to OA, supporting OA monitoring and reporting within Elements necessitates greater flexibility and ongoing attention to global mandates. Here are some of the changes in Elements functionality that have either been made, are in progress, or are planned in our upcoming roadmap: 

Extending support for repository integrations

Repository integrations remain an important part of OA monitoring, and we continue to support streamlining deposit workflows. For the majority of institutional and funder policies, the Green OA pathway remains the central part of the workflow. Organisations using Elements can continue with the established data verification and curation workflows, and use our powerful Repository Tools 2 (RT2) integration with repositories to customise harvesting, depositing and automated updates. These functionalities are now offered to clients using DSpace (fully supported from Elements v.6.9), Eprints, Hyrax, and Figshare for Institutions (fully supported from Elements v.6.9). 

Capturing more OA-related metadata from existing data sources

We have expanded the range of metadata available to provide organisations with a fuller picture of their OA activities and OA publishing patterns. 

One disruptive side-step in the workflow for many institutions is needing to go out of Elements to check whether an article has been published in a fully OA journal. Elements now allows institutions to capture this information manually or from integrated sources (eg. Dimensions, WoS & DOAJ) to flag potential Gold OA status (available from v.6.9).

New inclusion of relevant data points will assist tracking key funder requirements. For example, The Wellcome Trust and NIH require deposits of publications to PubMed Central/ EPMC. From v.6.10 Elements starts to capture file level metadata from EPMC, offering additional information on full-text deposits, relevant dates and licences that could be integrated into your verification workflow. Another example is the improved control over deposit versions and reuse licences in recent releases, which will help make it easier for researchers to remember to select CC-BY licence for the Author’s Accepted Manuscript and make that deposit compliant for the UKRI policy.

Next steps in Elements 

Following on from extensive user research in this space, we plan to build upon our existing rich feature set to offer additional open access monitoring functionality to help  institutions understand the many different pathways their researchers use to make their research openly available. We also plan to evolve our OA policy compliance capabilities to remain in step with the changes in key funder policies.

The future of the OA landscape

Following on from extensive user research in this space, we continue to engage with clients in an ongoing series of user-led workshops which aim to craft guidance on the more nebulous areas of open access – such as data availability statements and rights retention policies. 

We will continue to closely monitor this shifting landscape, proactively working to create functionality to fit incoming mandates across geographies and working closely with the Elements community to identify ways to support OA engagement, compliance and reporting. 

If you’d like to engage with us on any of the areas raised in this blog, please get in touch.

A New Zealand university has become a leader in demonstrating its research expertise, equipment and facilities – and it’s building a stronger research community along the way.

In the Māori language, the word “rāpoi” means to “cluster” or to “gather together”. It just so happens that a high-performance computing cluster (HPC) at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington (Te Herenga Waka) is named the Rāpoi HPC, and – perhaps by a happy coincidence – it’s become one of the star attractions of that university’s new showcase of research equipment, capabilities and expertise.

Over the past couple of years, Te Herenga Waka in the nation’s North Island capital of Wellington has been working closely with Symplectic and its own research community to “gather together” what is now among the world’s most impressive – and publicly searchable – collections of resources at any university available for research and consultancy.

Human resources (expertise) and infrastructure resources (equipment, facilities and services) are now all discoverable at the Wellington university’s portal, which is powered by Symplectic: https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/

Sheila Law, Research Information Systems Administrator with Te Herenga Waka’s Research Office, says having earlier built a showcase of the university’s academic expertise through new, searchable staff profiles, the next challenge was to tackle its infrastructure.

“The aim was to create a searchable catalogue of specialist equipment, to showcase our state-of-the-art capabilities, which could be used to support external engagement and facilitate long-lasting collaborations with other researchers,” Sheila says.

But until work began in late 2021, there was no central location or asset register of equipment to refer to. “All the information was held in institutes and schools and centres, with no overview of the resources that we had.”

Kate Byrne, VP Product Management with Symplectic, says: “We’ve found from working with organisations around the world that although many of them have data of this kind, it is very fragmented. And so one of the things we’ve been looking at most is to help some of our clients to start thinking about the early stages of that journey, because it’s very easy to look at our tools and go: isn’t this shiny, it would be great to do that. But actually stepping back and looking at where that data is going to come from, and how you’re going to work with your community to enable it, is part of the challenge,” Kate says.

Wellington’s university was up to the challenge. The small project team worked closely with school managers and technical managers, and with the assistance of internal champions, they gathered all the data needed, arranged for photos to be taken, and identified four categories under which equipment could be clustered: software, instruments, database, and services. 

While the data gathering and entry was painstaking, the result is that Wellington’s university now has a central register with 300 pieces of equipment on show both internally and externally. The portal is notable for its data completeness and quality, and provides images to help demonstrate its equipment and facilities. 

Sheila says the university’s staff responded to the finished product straight away. “As soon as we launched it, we started to get interest from areas where they were seeing the potential in it. 

“There was one – the Rāpoi – it’s a sort of computer data hub, which is available for anybody across the university to use. It was great to get that on there. And as soon as that was available, the staff that were using it wanted to link to it from their personal profiles. So that was nice to see – that was our first proof that people are liking this, and now they can see how useful it is, that they can actually show the full capability of their expertise and the resources they have available to them.” 

Since its launch earlier this year, the Wellington university’s equipment website has also gathered interest from staff in New Zealand government departments, who are currently working on a solution for a National Research System. 

Symplectic has been with Te Herenga Waka every step of the way. “How Wellington’s university has approached this challenge and developed such a successful outcome should become a showcase example to other institutions. It’s been a pleasure working with them,” Kate says. 

Sheila says the University’s staff have been critical to the project’s success. “One of our key learnings is how we engage with staff to ensure they become the experts in using the system, and managing the categories and resources that they need to optimise the curation of research activities. 

“By providing ongoing support, we increase the understanding and build confidence in using the system, and we also seek and receive feedback from those users to understand how they’re using the system, and also how they would wish to use it.” 

The concept of “gathering together” – of information and the research community – is ongoing: 

“We continue to look at ways in which we can enhance our profiles further, to create a one-stop ecosystem of interconnected research activities. We continue to explore and test new functionality as it’s made available, to see how we can reduce manual effort, to curate a rich and versatile research ecosystem, to build our reporting capability, and to help researchers expand their research opportunities and find new collaborators.” 

For more information about Symplectic’s Discovery module and Public Profiles: www.symplectic.co.uk/public-profiles