Research Information Management

Service Description

Provides a single access point for users to view details of all their research activity and manage their personal profile for internal and external publication. Enables users to highlight any inconsistency or errors for data owner action ensuring their profile is correct and up to date. The University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation requests all REF eligible staff use the service for quality assessment selection and scoring their research outputs.

Provides a tool set for users to manage research and commercial projects. The University’s Business Development Directorate requests this service is used for all externally funded research applications and commercial project bids.

Features

Research activity management:

  • Single point for managing all research and commercial activities
  • Individual web profile management including publications
  • List of  PGR students currently supervised
  • Integration of publication data and citation information from external databases (Web of Science and Scopus) and the University's Open Repository (E-Prints)
  • Primary data source for the Research Excellence Framework submission
  • Quality assessment selection and scoring of individuals’ research outputs
  • Delegated profile management for authorized users
  • Secondary affiliations management
  • Reporting tailored to the requirements of each level of the University incorporating amongst others: application, award and income rates, research outputs, citations and comparisons against peer groups and comparator institutions.

Research and commercial project management:

  • Project definition
  • Costing and pricing
  • Workflow and approval process management (pre-award/award/post-award)
  • Document and email repository management
  • Project tracking (expenditure and revenue)
  • Financial and HR systems integration
  • Reporting (project/financial/external/statutory)

Users

Research activity management: All academic staff

Research and commercial project management:

  • All University staff (limited access)
  • Key user groups (training pre-requisite for full access)
    • Business Development Directorate
    • Finance
    • School and Institute administrators
    • Principal Investigators

Service Hours

Systems available 07:00-02:00, 7 days a week.

System “at risk” period 02:00-07:00, 7 days a week.

The “at risk” period is 07:00-09:00 every Tuesday. Further planned maintenance times will be publicised in advance if there will be a disruption to the service.

Level of Service

All data is securely held and backed-up daily.

Support and Documentation

User guides and help documents are available from within the applications.

Additional support is available via the IT Service Desk, for contact details go to http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/support/itservicedesk/.

The IT Service Desk ensures that support requests that are system-specific will be handled by the IT Service and that support requests that relate to the business processes will be handled by Finance and RES.

All incidents relating to this service will be handled according to the Incident Management and Major Incident Management processes.

Request Process

All University staff can access the service via the web interfaces:

Requests for any other aspect of the service should be made via the IT Service Desk, for contact details go to http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/support/itservicedesk/.

All requests relating to this service will be handled according to the Request Fulfilment process.

User Responsibility

Users are expected to make use of the documentation before contacting the Service Desk for help.

Costs

N/A