In November 2017, Flinders began an exciting journey to modernise its digital research management environment, to meet research objectives outlined in Making a Difference: The 2025 Agenda.

After an intensive period of consultation with the research community, Research Development and Support (RDS) and Digital Research Services (DRS) ran an open tender for a software solution to replace the ageing ResearchMaster system; replace RePortal; and help streamline ethics approvals. Our research community told us that the solution had to be easy to use and work as a single system.

The tender team selected two components that would be integrated to establish a solid foundation for the evolving Research Ecosystem at Flinders:

• Elsevier Pure for improved research management
• Infonetica ERM for more efficient ethics process management.

A project team, drawn from DRS, RDS, and the Library, will release the integrated Pure and ERM solution in four stages.

By early 2019, Stage 1 will be released. This will provide researchers with more accurate publication management, as well as enriched researcher profiles to help promote Flinders research and collaborations. Stage 1 will also include the first of the new ethics processes being co-designed by RDS, ethics committees, and stakeholders.

In subsequent releases in 2019 the remaining functionality from ResearchMaster and RePortal, and other ethics processes, will be transferred to the new solution.

To find out more, visit the DRS website, or sign up for the RDS Inspiring Research newsletter. We welcome your feedback – just email Research Management Project.