Illinois Research Connections Researcher Information System Project Rebecca Bryant, PhD

Where do you go to find information about Illinois expertise? Departmental web site? Individual web site? Google Scholar? How do you find information across the Illinois campus? 2

Project goals Goal 1 of the University of Illinois Strategic Plan proposes the development of a faculty profile- sharing database in order to promote scholarship, discovery & innovation. This system will: – Connect researchers with potential collaborators – Showcase Illinois research to external stakeholders – Automate publication data collection from reliable source(s) – This project is NOT intended to support activity reporting and assessment 3

A few use cases Faculty, researchers, & staff – Identify a potential collaborator with niche expertise—on- or off- campus – Identify potential reviewers with needed expertise—for grant, fellowship, P&T, and much more Grad students/postdocs/undergrads: – Identify advisors, mentors, and committee members External – Media outlets looking for experts to interview on current events topics – General public, BOT, legislators, & potential corporate partners: view the breadth, depth, and significant of campus research in one central place.

Project scope Collaborative OVCR/Library initiative Comprehensive – Up to 2,500 faculty & researcher profiles – Inclusion of all HR appointments for each included researcher Interdisciplinary – Will include all disciplines, academic colleges and departments at Illinois – It will also include research-oriented centers and institutes 5

Governance & communications Faculty working group (Feb 2014) defined project goals & recommended vendor product Steering & governance committees provide continuing guidance Training and ongoing support will be provided for colleges, departments, individual researchers 6

Project platform & data sources Proprietary product called “Pure” by Elsevier Pre-populates profiles with publication information in Scopus publications index Automatic weekly updates from Scopus data Automatic creation of Fingerprint TM concepts 7

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Challenges & Opportunities Scopus index is comprehensive, but it has some subject area weaknesses, particularly in HSS University Library is working to scrape OCLC WorldCat publications data to capture monographs & book chapters Planning to include in Spring 2016 PUBLIC launch Phased roll-out Fall 2015: AY2015 TT faculty only—no clinical faculty and only OVCR AP’s Will work to include NTT researchers (up to 2,500) after BETA Difficult to capture NTT researchers Will work with colleges annually to manually collect and maintain these researchers, beginning Fall 2015 Users, proxies, & unit-assigned administrators can edit & enhance profiles Online resources/FAQs for users Future training sessions for unit administrators 9

Can Users and Units Manage Profile Content? Users may: – Add publications, hide publications – Change display name – Add profile enhancements like a photo or other CV information – Delegate a proxy to edit their profile for them Units may: – Unit XOs can assign one or more unit administrators to maintain records for users within their unit(s) – Online resources available at – In-person workshop and video training coming this fall 10

Timeline BETA launch – Coming Fall 2015 – Working system with Elsevier-delivered publications data – Available to UIUC IP addresses only – AY2015 faculty & OVCR institutes – No humanities faculty or units – Campus-only communications & training, working with units to designate administrators PUBLIC launch – Spring 2016 – AY2016 faculty – Inclusion of humanities faculty, units, and better coverage of their publications – Expanded inclusion of NTT researchers, as designated by their colleges – Widespread outreach 11

Longer-term Opportunities Expanding coverage – Add monographs & book chapters from OCLC WorldCat to enhance humanities/social science coverage – Campus information: grants, patents – Unit/individual enhancement of records – Improve author disambiguation through integration with ORCID Interoperability – How can other campus systems ingest this automatically-updated information? 12

DEMO

FAQs How will I be able to access? – There will be a link from once the portal is live. How can colleges allocate non-tenure-line faculty & researchers for IRC inclusion? – Annual nomination process by colleges, per allocation formula, up to 2,500 researchers – Can I edit my profile? – Yes, via Shibboleth authentication. – Users can delegate proxies to edit their profiles (must – Units can assign unit administrators to manage expert profiles in one or more departments – You can change your display name, add missing publications, manage existing ones, and add profile enhancements like a photo and other CV information – Visit our FAQs at for guidancehttp://go.illinois.edu/irc Who do I contact with questions? – 14