Persistent identifiers – or PIDs – are long-lasting references to digital resources. In other words, they are a unique label to an entity: a person, place, or thing. PIDs work by redirecting the user to the online resource, even if the location of that resource changes. They also have associated metadata which contains information about the entity and also provide links to other PIDs. For example, many scholars already populate their ORCID records, linking themselves to their research outputs through Crossref and DataCite DOIs. As the PID ecosystem matures, to include PIDs for grants (Crossref grant IDs), projects (RAiD), and organisations (ROR), the connections between PIDs form a graph that describes the research landscape. In this post, Phill Jones talks about the work that the MoreBrains cooperative has been doing to show the value of a connected PID-based infrastructure.

Over the past year or so, we at MoreBrains have been working with a number of national-level research supporting organisations to develop national persistent identifier (PID) strategies: Jisc in the UK; the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and Australian Access Federation (AAF) in Australia; and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network CRKN, Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC), and Canadian Persistent Identifier Advisory Committee (CPIDAC) in Canada. In all three cases, we’ve been investigating the value of developing PID-based research infrastructures, and using data from various sources, including Dimensions, to quantify that value. In our most recent analysis, we found that investing in five priority PIDs could save the Australian research sector as much as 38,000 person days of work per year, equivalent to $24 million (AUD), purely in direct time savings from rekeying of information into institutional research management systems.

Investing in infrastructure makes a lot of sense, whether you’re building roads, railways, or research infrastructure. But wise investors also want evidence that their investment is worthwhile – that the infrastructure is needed, that it will be used, and, ideally, that there will be a return of some kind on their investment. Sometimes, all of this is easy to measure; sometimes, it’s not.

In the case of PID infrastructure, there has long been a sense that investment would be worthwhile. In 2018, in his advice to the UK government, Adam Tickell recommended:

Jisc to lead on selecting and promoting a range of unique identifiers, including ORCID, in collaboration with sector leaders with relevant partner organisations

More recently, in Australia, the Minister for Education, Jason Clare, wrote a letter of expectations to the Australian Research Council in which he stated:

Streamlining the processes undertaken during National Competitive Grant Program funding rounds must be a high priority for the ARC… I ask that the ARC identify ways to minimise administrative burden on researchers

In the same letter, Minister Clare even suggested that preparations for the 2023 ERA be discontinued until a plan to make the process easier has been developed. While he didn’t explicitly mention PIDs in the letter, organisations like ARDC, AAF, and ARC see persistent identifiers as a big part of the solution to this problem.

A problem of chickens and eggs?

With all the modern information technology available to us it seems strange that, in 2022, we’re still hearing calls to develop basic research management infrastructure. Why hasn’t it already been developed? Part of the problem is that very little work has been done to quantify the value of research infrastructure in general, or PID-based infrastructure in particular. Organisations like Crossref, Datacite, and ORCID are clear success stories but, other than some notable exceptions like this, not much has been done to make the benefits of investment clear at a policy level – until now.

It’s very difficult to analyse the costs and benefits of PID adoption without being able to easily measure what’s happening in the scholarly ecosystem. So, in these recent analyses that we were commissioned to do, we asked questions like:

• How many research grants were awarded to institutions within a given country?
• How many articles have been published based on work funded by those grants?
• What proportion of researchers within a given country have ORCID IDs?
• How many research projects are active at any given time?

All these questions proved challenging to answer because, fundamentally, it’s extremely difficult to quantify the scale of research activity and the connections between research entities in the absence of universally adopted PIDs. In other words, we need a well-developed network of PIDs in order to easily quantify the benefits of investing in PIDs in the first place! (see Figure 1.)

Luckily, the story doesn’t end there. Thanks to data donated by Digital Science, and other organisations including ORCID, Crossref, Jisc, ARDC, AAF, and several research institutions in the UK, Canada, and Australia, we were able to piece together estimates for many of our calculations.

Take, for example, the Digital Science Dimensions database, which provided us with the data we needed for our Australian and UK use cases. It uses advanced computation and sophisticated machine learning approaches to build a graph of research entities like people, grants, publications, outputs, institutions etc. While other similar graphs exist, some of which are open and free to use – for example, the DataCite PID graph (accessed through DataCite commons), OpenAlex, and the ResearchGraph foundation – the Dimensions graph is the most complete and accessible so far. It enabled us to estimate total research activity in both the UK and Australia.

However, all our estimates are… estimates, because they involve making an automated best guess of the connections between research entities, where those connections are not already explicit. If the metadata associated with PIDs were complete and freely available in central PID registries, we could easily and accurately answer questions like ‘How many active researchers are there in a given country?’ or ‘How many research articles were based on funding from a specific funder or grant program?’

The five priority PIDs

As a starting point towards making these types of questions easy to answer, we recommend that policy-makers work with funders, institutions, publishers, PID organisations, and other key stakeholders around the world to support the adoption of five priority PIDs:

• DOIs for funding grants
• DOIs for outputs (eg publications, datasets, etc)
• ORCIDs for people
• RAiDs for projects
• ROR for research-performing organisations

We prioritised these PIDs based on research done in 2019, sponsored by Jisc and in response to the Tickell report, to identify the key PIDs needed to support open access workflows in institutions. Since then, thousands of hours of research and validation across a range of countries and research ecosystems have verified that these PIDs are critical not just for open access but also for improving research workflows in general.

Going beyond administrative time savings

In our work, we have focused on direct savings from a reduction in administrative burden because those benefits are the most easily quantifiable; they’re easiest for both researchers and research administrators to relate to, and they align with established policy aims. However, the actual benefits of investing in PID-based infrastructure are likely far greater.

Evidence given to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in 2017 stated that every £1 spent on Research and Innovation in the UK results in a total benefit of £7 to the UK economy. The same is likely to be true for other countries, so the benefit to national industrial strategies of increased efficiency in research are potentially huge.

Going a step further, the universal adoption of the five priority PIDs would also enable institutions, companies, funders, and governments to make much better research strategy decisions. At the moment, bibliometric and scientometric analyses to support research strategy decisions are expensive and time-consuming; they rely on piecing together information based on incomplete evidence. By using PIDs for entities like grants, outputs, people, projects, and institutions, and ensuring that the associated metadata links to other PIDs, it’s possible to answer strategically relevant questions by simply extracting and combining data from PID registries.

Final thoughts

According to UNESCO, global spending on R&D has reached US$1.7 trillion per year, and with commitments from countries to address the UN sustainable development goals, that figure is set to increase. Given the size of that investment and the urgency of the problems we face, building and maintaining the research infrastructure makes sound sense. It will enable us to track, account for, and make good strategic decisions about how that money is being spent.

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

Governments and research consortia can reap great benefits for the community and industry through large, shared research facilities and infrastructure.

What happens when experiments are too big and too expensive for a single university to run?

Some research efforts need to be conducted at a huge scale, drawing on multiple partner institutions; it’s not always feasible or advisable for one institution to be the sole focus of that work. Instead, large scientific instruments and experimental infrastructure are built and maintained at central facilities.

These advanced research tools range from underground labs at the bottom of mines, to free-electron lasers and particle accelerators – such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland.

Due to their scale and cost, these facilities tend to be built and managed by government agencies or public research funders and made available to the national or international research communities. Such research facilities represent a major, long-term investment in a region’s research and innovation capability – from initial conception, to designing, building, maintaining, and upgrading facilities and their equipment, the commitment required from governments and their agencies can span decades of public expenditure.

For example, by the time Diamond – the UK’s national synchrotron light source – started accelerating electrons, it was one of the British Government’s largest capital expenditures on research and development in 40 years, costing £260 million (more than US $300 million in today’s currency). From the time of the initial report in the 1990s recommending its construction to the date of its first user beam in 2007, the synchrotron had taken 14 years to come to fruition.

Why do governments and funders invest so much in central research facilities?

The discoveries made at central facilities would be impossible elsewhere. Experiments at such facilities employ highly specialised technical equipment and foster collaboration between leading experts, attracting national and international scientific talent. This combination of technical excellence with scientific expertise leads to novel results, the creation of new knowledge and innovation, and pushes the frontiers of many research fields. From an academic standpoint, it ensures high-impact publications and insights that can have a ripple effect through science and education for decades to come. For governments, industry and the community, such discoveries can lead to great economic and social outcomes.

How do researchers get to run experiments at central facilities?

Many facilities operate a user program; the “users” are often researchers based at universities or government agencies, visiting the facility for a few days or weeks to perform experiments that further their research. While at the facility they work with a second group of researchers and technical crew, employed by the facility to run the scientific instruments. The users and inhouse researchers collaborate to run experiments and publish the results from experiments as co-authors.

How can Dimensions be used to evaluate user facilities?  

Dimensions is the world’s largest database of research information, including individual researchers and their institutions, their research grants, publications, datasets, patents – even clinical trials as a linked dataset. Using Dimensions, it’s possible to delve into the connections between researchers, including those working at central research facilities.

Here we explore the collaboration patterns of users and in-house researchers at ISIS Neutron and Muon Source in the UK. At ISIS, beams of neutrons or muons are used to study materials at the atomic scale – from cracks in wind turbine blades to the structures of viruses and the inner workings of lithium batteries.  

We’ve made this example a bit harder for ourselves because ISIS is not currently indexed in Dimensions as a research organisation; instead, inhouse scientists are shown to be affiliated to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) where ISIS is based. Therefore, to find articles that include experimental results from ISIS, we can devise a search string within Dimensions that returns articles mentioning ISIS in the full text. This search string will, for example, look into each article’s methods sections, in which co-authors will indicate that data was collected at ISIS. Sounds complex? Not really, because the information available to Dimensions is so deep that we’re able to conduct this search with relative ease.

Who gets to use these facilities, and how can Dimensions help?

Comparative analyses are always useful. Here (Figure 1) we’ve conducted an analysis that compares the use of ISIS Neutron and Muon Source by researchers at the 24 leading Russell Group universities (effectively the UK’s “Ivy League”) with all other non-Russell Group universities. We can see which institution’s researchers get to use ISIS by comparing the number of articles that mention that facility.

We see that Russell Group researchers are nearly three times more likely to be co-authors on publications mentioning ISIS than a non-Russell Group researcher.

Such an analysis could be used to identify opportunities to widen the user base of central facilities, ensuring that all eligible researchers – regardless of their home institution, country or research focus – have the opportunity to run experiments at those facilities.

In this network diagram (Figure 2) we see which research organisations are collaborating with ISIS. Co-authorship is used as a proxy for collaboration; if researchers from two different organisations have co-authored an article, then that is considered a collaboration between their two organisations.

As we might expect, articles that mention ISIS are most often co-authored by teams of researchers from RAL and UK universities, usually Russell Group. However, this network diagram reveals a second set of collaborations between inhouse researchers at ISIS affiliated to RAL and researchers at other neutron facilities across Europe and the US.

Similar analyses could be prepared showing collaborations between individual users, disciplines or countries. Dimensions’ full-text search means that analysis could also focus on a whole national laboratory site, such as RAL or Argonne National Laboratory, a single machine, or facility.

What else can Dimensions show?

There are a host of questions that Dimensions can support governments and funders in answering, including:

• Which research areas or emerging technologies are facility experiments contributing to?
  Value: To anticipate the current and future needs of the research community and inform beamline commissioning and future strategy.
• Comparing facilities – do existing or future infrastructure plans copy, compete or complement similar facilities? Are there existing collaborations or opportunities to foster new collaborations?
  Value: To avoid duplication and needless expense, and maximise strategic expenditure.
• Do participants of facilities’ training programs become facility users?
  Value: To see where training and professional development programs are demonstrating the most effectiveness, leading to return on investment.
• Find experiment proposal reviewers with relevant expertise.
  Value: Identifying cross-collaboration opportunities and widening the pool of facility users.
• Are funding agency award holders using facilities?
  Value: Identifying appropriate use of public expenditure and return on investment.

About Dimensions

Part of Digital Science, Dimensions is a modern, innovative, linked research data infrastructure and tool, re-imagining discovery and access to research: grants, publications, citations, clinical trials, patents and policy documents in one place. www.dimensions.ai 

Talk with our team about how Dimensions can support your research.