ResearchNow and ResearchNow Ethics & Biosafety

Following the launch of ResearchNow in August, researchers, supported by Research Development and Support (RDS) and Library staff, have been reviewing and updating their research profiles and adding and importing new research outputs from Scopus. The enhancement of researcher profiles will continue through the end of the year as the project team prepares updates to the Staff Profile Pages to link directly from staff profiles to the relevant research profile in the ResearchNow Portal. The ResearchNow Portal will then be made publicly accessible.

The joint RDS and DRS project team are now working on the second ResearchNow release. This release focuses on providing functionality to support research Applications, Awards and Projects. The RDS team will use this functionality early in 2020, before releasing it to the wider research community later in 2020.

A ResearchNow User Group will meet for the first time in November, with representatives from across the research community, with the objective of reviewing and improving the ongoing use of the ResearchNow system.

The ResearchNow Ethics and Biosafety application will be made available in late October with the release of online Animal Ethics forms. As with ResearchNow, a range of quality and user-friendly support material for self-led learning will be made available and RDS staff will be on call to provide user assistance. Human Ethics and Biosafety applications will be released by the end of 2019.

Inspire – Student Goals and the first release of Examinations

Inspire is already helping students focus on what they need to do to successfully complete their candidature. When we asked higher degree research (HDR) students how Inspire could improve, they told us they wanted the ability to set their own career focus and goals and have the system track these. In response to this feedback, the Office of Graduate Research (OGR) has once again collaborated with DRS to create a new module in Inspire — the Career Planning module which was released to students and launched at DocFest on the 5th of September.

The Career Planning module allows HDR students to:

• Set a primary and secondary career focus, by selecting one of: academic, industry, or entrepreneurial.
• Set goals with completion dates and activities corresponding to their selected career focus.
• See their own goals on their landing page in Inspire and adjust timeframes should the need arise.
• See completed goals appear in their ‘completed activities log’ that feed into their next Milestone Review, allowing them to manage their own progress.
• Change their career focus, goals, dates, and activities at any time.

In mid-October, DRS also released the first stage of the HDR Examination process into Inspire. This release includes a student intention to submit milestone that triggers the nomination of examiners process for the HDR supervisors. The streamlining of this process is expected to improve turnaround times for HDR examinations and further examinations developments will be released later this year. In addition to the improved examination processes, the reminder emails will now be sent on a fortnightly basis.

Ageing Colossus High Performance Computer (HPC) decommissioned

Over the October long weekend, the ageing Colossus HPC was decommissioned by Digital Platform Operations.  In the lead up to this event, DRS contacted all Colossus users and migrated them to the new Deep Thought HPC.  The migration was completed successfully with all users now able to access this improved service.

Covidence for Systematic reviews

In September Flinders Library and DRS collaborated to provide site wide access to Covidence, a tool for used by the research community for systematic reviews. This is offered at no cost to the research community, during an initial one-year trial period. Covidence facilitates the literature review process using systematic methods to collect secondary data, critically appraise research studies and synthesise findings.