Pure goes live at the University of Bath

The first phase of the Pure CRIS rollout at the University of Bath started in July, when the system was made available to all academic and research staff. Having reported on CRIS and CERIF developments for JISC for the past couple of years, being able to access (and use) information about my own research in a real live system is exciting stuff!

A user profile has been set up for all academic and research staff, so on logging into the system for the first time, existing data can be accessed on research grants and contracts, publications and postgraduate research students. Information in the profile has been taken from several University systems including human resources, the EPrints instutional repository, finance and the student system. I can report that the interface is very user friendly, having just added a new publication (including full text) to my profile. For now, staff can only access their own research information; at a later date tailored views will be possible, so that eg Heads of Department will be able to view departmental data. There is a facility to create CVs and bibliographies and later this year automatic population of personal web pages will be available. The Research Development and Support Office provides a Pure User Guide and a series of training workshops is being held from July until end September.

The REF module will go live at the end of September, with a ‘dress rehearsal’ exercise planned to start in October. The Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN will also be working with University of Bath colleagues to test REF submission from Pure using CERIF; a CERIF XML template is currently being developed with HEFCE.

The institutional repository will be populated via Pure from now on – adding a full-text document to a publication’s record automatically adds the full-text document to the corresponding record in the IR. However, like many other UK universities, Bath will assess the requirement for a separate repository in the medium term, if it can be demonstrated that Pure is capable of replicating EPrints functionality.

The reporting module is due to be launched in November, following further development work by Atira to cater for specific UK reporting requirements.

Jane Millar, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, and Pure Project Sponsor, has said that the implementation of Pure is a major step forward in how  information about research is handled at the University. It’s certainly looking good from a researcher point of view.