We now have over 50,000 research outputs in Pure!
In this post we look behind the scenes into how we capture publications in order to achieve Open Access…
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| Celebratory tiramisu |
Yes, the pudding is correct, we now have over 50,000 publications records in Pure!
At the University of St Andrews we use Pure as our Current Research Information System (CRIS). Pure has been our CRIS since 2010, replacing an in-house system. Since its first installation Pure has undergone many iterations, improvements, and even changed ownership! It has many functions, including capturing publications, impacts, datasets, activities, as well as providing reporting functions, such as for funders’ open access policies and the Research Excellence Framework. It also integrates with other university systems, such as the HR database, meaning that it provides up to the minute evidence of the research activities of current staff, while also maintaining an historic record for previous staff as well. Pure feeds the St Andrews Research Portal, http://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/, which is the public front end for the system, as well as providing data used to populate researcher profiles in staff webpages. It also links to our University repository (STaRR), so when the open access team has validated a publication record in Pure which has full text attached it will be sent to the repository for public open access.
Research staff, PhD students, and certain support staff have access to Pure, and the majority of research publications are uploaded by this subset of users. However, many may be surprised to learn that since 2016 over 40% of publications records in Pure were created by the Library on behalf of authors, and 26% were created by just one member of our team – Kirsty. Kirsty uses multiple online sources to import publications records, each of which has its own unique process. Below Kirsty gives us a little snippet of this work:
“The aim of this part of my workflow is to capture research papers which have not already been added to Pure by the researcher or support staff. Having accumulated various methods of capturing University of St Andrews affiliated papers, one particular source I would like to mention is Scopus. I receive weekly notifications via an RSS feed and email alert of new(ish) St Andrews research papers. Since January 2016, 265 journal articles were imported via Scopus, and of this 135 were imported by myself. Also Scopus manages to detect papers from a variety of disciplines – not just the Sciences! It is an extremely useful tool in helping maintain a successful compliance rating for the University, and especially with regards to meeting funders’ requirements.” (Kirsty Knowles, Senior Library Assistant (Open Access))
The Pure team also deserve an honourable mention here, as they look after the day-to-day running of the system, as well as creating many records on behalf of staff, often at the beginning of an academic’s move to St Andrews.
“The Pure team can assist new members of staff in adding their publications, by importing from a compatible file format, or manually adding publications if that is not available. Please contact me, Norman Stewart, on [email protected] if you would like assistance. I work closely with the Open Access team, forwarding any potential Open Access publication candidates to them for prompt addition to the system.” (Norm Stewart, Pure System Administrator)
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| Norm Stewart, Pure System Administrator, and the tiramisu |
The 50,000 milestone represents only the Research Outputs (publications) recorded in Pure. Additional records cover Activities, Datasets and other content.