The UCT Research Portal:a head-in-the-clouds view

Research Office

Showcase

My eResearch

Scholarly work Profiles Search

Experts

My Ethics

Research Facilities

Finance

VulaLibraries and

Repository

My Storage

My Tools

My Grants

HR

Outside View

My Staff

eResearch Tab onUCT Home Page

Inside View

My Students My Contracts

The way we thought it should be (mid-2011)

Research Office

My eResearch

My Ethics

Research Facilities

Finance

VulaLibraries and

Repository

My Storage

My Tools

My Grants

HR

My Staff

eResearch Tab onUCT Home Page

My Students My Contracts

Scholarly Resources Profiles

Experts

Showcase = Research Office Site

The way we think it should be now (mid-2012):

Secure access for researchers to portal; public access to RO site

What is happening now? Phase 1, live Feb 2012

My eResearch

Research Facilities

VulaLibraries and

Repository

My Tools

Created and linked / redesigned Web pages, linked a database, established Portal site

NOTE: we presently do not know what to use for Portal – several options existNOTE 2: FULL implementation has to wait for UCT Web renewal

What is planned for longer term? Phase 2, live by Nov 2012

My eResearch

Research Facilities

VulaLibraries and

Repository

My Tools

Scholarly Resources Profiles

Create some dynamic access links to Irma / other databases, create templated Profiles which include “Scholarly Resources” – publication lists and other forms of publication

NOTE: both Scholarly Resources and Profiles require significant development and policy decisions. Eg: SR not just database output; also represents “non conventional” publications for Humanities etc – video, digitised artworks?

Search Experts

What requires serious integration?

My eResearch

Research Facilities

VulaLibraries and

Repository

My Tools

Research Office

My EthicsFinance

My Storage

My Grants

HR

My Staff My Students

Scholarly Resources Profiles

Experts

My Contracts

All modules that get information from other systems: SAP for finances, PeopleSoft for student information, University Office for ethics, contracts and publication counts

Objective for Profiles: 1

One of the key is to reduce the number of times that a UCT academic has to provide the same information for different institutions or purposes, to one time only! The two obvious points of overlap are with NRF and the UCT Research Office.NRF:• Many/most UCT academics have registered with the NRF and have provided

extensive information in the NRF online system. We suggest the following data flows between NRF and UCT:

• The primary capture point for personal and contact information should be the NRF system. In general, this information from NRF would be sent to UCT after capture or update and uploaded into the Research Portal to pre-populate or update the fields in the Profile/CV database in the sections for Personal Information, Qualifications and Career Profile. To cater for those academics who have not registered with the NRF, provision must also be made for this information to be captured in the Research Portal.

• The primary capture point for Scholarly Outputs should be the Research Portal, with the subset of information required by NRF being sent to them automatically. We envisage a once-off transfer of this information from NRF to UCT to get the existing “Own Contribution” text for each output object into the Research Portal database.

Objective for Profiles: 2

UCT Research Office:• The Research Office prepares the UCT publication count and claim and for this purpose

needs standard bibliographic information about all publications, together with the identification of which authors are affiliated to UCT. We propose that a UCT affiliation indicator should be captured against all authors in the Scholarly Outputs section of the Research Portal Profile/CV.

• All new or updated Scholarly Outputs which meet the requirements for the publication count should then be automatically uploaded to IRMA.

It is no longer sensible to capture any bibliographic information that is readily available via a web-based system (e.g. Scopus or Web of Knowledge) or a reference management system (e.g. RefWorks or EndNote). We need to implement an automated upload mechanism utilising a standard format.

Use by Faculties / University Committees (eg: URC):These bodies could make use of Profiles and Scholarly Resources information to “pull” data for specific purposes into forms to be used for academic assessment and leave, and applications for travel and research and equipment funding

We’re live….

Home Page –accessible viastandard login

Access Statistics to May 2012:

These are the top referrers in order:http://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/commerce/news/2012/pages/eresearch.asp http://www.researchoffice.uct.ac.za/ http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/research-help/research-support-linkshttp://www.icts.uct.ac.za/modules.phphttp://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/research-portal-news

Top destinations (pages being visited):1. funding.aspx 2. referencing.aspx 3. blogroll-and-archives.aspx 4. scientific-computing.aspx 5. research-facilities.aspx 6. dataservices.aspx 7. datasets-and-collections.aspx 8. ratingassessments.aspx 9. researchresources.aspx

News feed direct from UCT Research Office site

Most accessed resource: note Research Professional Africa site is a highly comprehensive and up-to-date catalogue of Africa-specific funding opportunities worldwide

Second most popular page: a collection of bibliographic tools for management of formal and informal publications and constructing reference lists

Increasingly popular page: access to various means of accurately assessing your own or others’ publication outputs – including informal or social media mentions

Collaboration tools for research: these include popular public tools like Dropbox, as well as UCT-specific tools like Vula and Sharepoint / MESH. Video conferencing information is also available.

The UCT HPC cluster recently achieved the impressive benchmark of 100,000 computing hours in 1 year. The support team has an excellent record in adapting all sorts of software to run on the cluster and on the SA Grid.

The Research Facilities database is a rapidly-growing interactive register of top-end research equipment and facilities at UCT. It provides instant access to information on what is available, whether it can be accessed by outsiders, and what the costs of operation / use are.

Sample view

Sample equipment entry

Home Page access to blogs and resources related to UCT Research

…and especiallythis…B-)