Research Profiles in a Changing Landscape: The University of Melbourne’s Research Profiles Conference 2016

The University of Melbourne is thrilled to be hosting the upcoming Research Profiles Conference 2016 on February 10th. This conference would not be possible without the generous support from Digital Science and Symplectic. The Conference was initiated by Simon Porter (who is now VP Academic Relationships and Knowledge Architecture at Digital Science) in 2012 when he established a ‘VIVO Community Day’. He built on the success and interest of this event with subsequent Research Profile Conferences in 2013 and 2014.This event continues to draw significant interest as universities across Australia and New Zealand explore further what knowledge management really means for them today.

We have coined the theme for this conference as ‘research profiles in a changing landscape’. Melbourne is well aware that the knowledge management market is young and moving quickly from a systems perspective. It is therefore critical we have opportunities to better understand how our peers are performing in this arena and what new options we can explore. We want to continue to investigate our strategic imperatives with public profiling of research, as well as how we can most faithfully represent research on an international stage.

I believe we have an agenda which will really stimulate thinking with some diverse speakers, including our keynote speaker, Eric Meeks from UCSF. Some of the topics covered will include:

• Beyond mandated data: where to next for research profiling systems
• How to go about collecting information for profiles
• SEO rankings and how to make research networking platforms more discoverable
• Delivering value: engaging researchers in publication and profile management
• Promoting your university and benchmarking

Creating and implementing a university-wide research profiling strategy requires collaboration across university boundaries. Our agenda aims to stimulate discussion around a vision that should appeal to research managers and decision makers, research technologists and leaders in research development and commercialisation, those in media and public relations and the library.

I can see that people will come away from this event with fresh ideas in how they can take that next step to using research profiling tools to meet the challenges in the current changing landscape.

Attendees may also be interested in attending the Symplectic Australasia Conference taking place on the 11-12 February at the same venue.

This post was written by Sophia Lagastes, Associate Director, Research Information & Business Systems at the University of Melbourne.