Making sure your research is available online is pretty essential for any researcher these days, not only to satisfy funder and REF requirements, but also to ensure that your work reaches as many people as possible. The problem is there are an endless amount of tools out there to help you do this and all these things can take time… something we don’t have a lot of these days.
What a good thing then, that over the coming weeks we will be getting ready to launch the Birmingham Research Portal!
This website will be linked to Pure, using the information you have already entered to promote research at Birmingham and allow others to access our research papers for free.
The portal is available to staff on campus throughout June to allow time for everyone to get their profiles up to date. The full launch will take place in July.
Pure has been in place a good few years now, but there is still some work to do to really achieve the goal of entering data once and reusing it multiplies times. The website is certainly an area where this needs to be developed and the portal is the first stage in this. It will display your publications, projects and activities all linked together on a profile page. At the moment this is a standalone site, and does not pull information from Pure into your current staff profile. This is something that we are keen to develop and is the next stage of the work. We are working on making sure that links between the main university site and the portal are also put in place.
Why a research portal?
As I’ve already mentioned, we need to make sure that our research outputs are made openly accessible and findable online. The new portal pages will be better indexed by search engines so should increase the number of downloads for our open documents.
I have a profile in Pure, what do I need to do?
We have tried to make the launch as easy as possible for researchers. Of course, a lot of information is already in Pure, but there are a few things that you can do to ensure your profile looks as good as it can.
- Have you added a photo to Pure?
- Add some text about your research interests and bibliography
- Do you have any links to social media or other webpages you’d like to add?
Where can I get help?
Of course we are around to support you with this. The Pure intranet pages have been updated with information about the portal release, we have drop in sessions booked for throughout June and there’s always the good old email address for any questions!
Why can’t I just use Researchgate?
Of course, with the release of the portal I’m not suggesting that you stop using tools such as Researchgate; these sites can be a great help with getting your research out there. But you might want to think about using the links from you outputs on the portal on other sites (instead of uploading the document, for example) to make sure that you are linking back to the validated open access version that has been checked by the Library team so you know that it meets all the publisher requirements.
The portal is available to staff on campus throughout June to allow time for everyone to get their profiles up to date. The full launch will take place in July.
