Symplectic and Figshare Offer New Integration to Improve Institutional Workflows
New integration offers a positive step towards making it even easier to open up research data, ensuring researchers get credit for all their research outputs.
London, UK and Boston, MA, USA, Monday December 5th 2017: Today, technology company Digital Science announced that two of its portfolio companies, research information management system provider Symplectic and data repository service Figshare, have launched a new integration, highlighting their continued commitment to ensuring researchers get credit for all of their academic work.
This next-generation integration will mean that research outputs deposited in either system can be automatically reflected in the other, saving researchers time and delivering valuable insights to institutional administrators.
This new integration will deliver immediate benefits to academic institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, who will be amongst the first to use the new functionality.
Through this integration:
- Publications and data can be deposited to Figshare for Institutions via Symplectic Elements complementing the existing deposit functionality in Figshare. This provides multiple pathways to encourage researchers to make their publications openly available.
- Elements can harvest publications and data from Figshare for Institutions and automatically claim them for researchers. Figshare content can be viewed within the wider context of institutional research activities managed in Symplectic Elements, saving researchers and administrators time and effort.
- Institutions gain access to a range of sophisticated tools for monitoring and reporting on Open Access engagement and compliance, making it easier for institutions to review and report on these activities. This integration allows Figshare for Institutions to be used in conjunction with the Symplectic Element’s OA Monitor.
- Figshare records are easily available for reuse in faculty profiles, annual faculty reporting activities, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and a wide range of other activities.
- Institutions can integrate Figshare for Institutions with Elements on its own or in combination with other repositories.
Jonathan Breeze, CEO of Symplectic, said:
“Symplectic’s clients place great value in controlling which systems they exchange data with, so I am delighted we have been able to add Figshare for Institutions as an additional target repository for users of Elements. The scholarly community has long called for greater recognition to be given to those who make their research openly available – what better way than to automatically inform the researcher’s own institution that a new file has been deposited openly in Figshare?”
Mark Hahnel, Founder of Figshare, said:
“Figshare is dedicated to making academic data more openly available and improving workflows to achieve this. Through our new integration with Symplectic Elements we have created an automated flow of information between the two systems to streamline deposits and save researchers and administrators valuable resources. We hope this integration will also help maximize deposits and raise the profile of open access activities at institutions globally.”
Keith Webster, Dean of Libraries, Director of Emerging and Integrative Media, Carnegie Mellon University Library said:
“In our efforts to create a 21st Century library, a significant part of our vision is built upon a large-scale shift to digital forms of content and web-based services. We already are using Symplectic Elements, which allows easy curation and re-use of our scholar’s publications record, and we are using Figshare as our repository. Through this integration we hope to create an ecosystem for our researchers which encourages them to make more of their research openly available whilst saving time and effort.”
This integration is available to clients using version 5.9 of Symplectic Elements.
Notes for Editors
Digital Science is a technology company serving the needs of scientific and research communities at key points along the full cycle of research. We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open, efficient and effective. We believe that together, we can change research for good.
Visit www.digital-science.com
Figshare is a web-based platform to help academic institutions manage, disseminate and measure the public attention of all their research outputs. The light-touch and user-friendly approach focuses on four key areas: research data management, reporting and statistics, research data dissemination and administrative control. Figshare works with institutions in North America and internationally to help them meet key funder recommendations and to provide world-leading tools to support an open culture of data sharing and collaboration. For more information, visit http://figshare.com and follow @figshare on Twitter.
Symplectic creates software that helps researchers, librarians and institutions collect, manage and showcase their research. First created in 2003, their flagship Elements system has evolved from managing scholarly publications to acting as the system of record for an institutions’ research activity; managing faculty assessments, recording research impact, open access engagement, and much more. Their core value remains: to reduce unnecessary administrative burden placed on academics.. Their software is used by over 350,000 researchers in 90+ prestigious institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Oxford, the University of Melbourne, and Duke University.
Further reading: Simon Porter’s White Paper: A New “Research Data Mechanics.”
