20 years of Symplectic

It became clear that what university staff and researchers were in need of was simple, effective software that would enable academic institutions to collect, contextualise and raise visibility of their research outputs. This was the genesis of Symplectic Elements, which was first trialled as ‘Symplectic Publications’ across Imperial College’s Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Life Science. In 2006, after the successful trial period, ‘Symplectic Publications’ was rolled out across the entirety of the Imperial campus – where it remains in use to this day, albeit looking very different!

The research lifecycle by its very nature is information-heavy, which translates into a lot of paperwork, data entry, and administration – whether that is carried out by the library or the research officer, or by faculty and researchers themselves. The outputs and metadata surrounding research present an information management problem: how can we control and manage our research and scholarly information, how can we make it discoverable so that it can be utilised to the best benefit of society, and how can we track and gain actionable insight into it?

Symplectic was launched at Imperial College in 2003 by four friends studying theoretical physics (Daniel Hook, John Fearns, Marko Ivin & Phil Parkin), who were frustrated by the experience of using outdated, fragmented systems while working on their PhDs. Together, they took on the challenge of freeing up researchers and administrators so that they could concentrate on their core mission and other value-add activities rather than manual, repetitive admin, giving them more time to spend on what’s important: driving and enabling global research.

All Digital Science ‘portfolio’ companies have a shared vision: that of a future where a trusted, frictionless, inter-connected research ecosystem drives progress for all. We aim to help people who make a difference make a difference – by making open, collaborative and inclusive research possible.

Becoming part of Digital Science gave Symplectic the means to work closely with other products and platforms which link together to mutually enhance and augment each others’ data sets, giving users of multiple products the most comprehensive view of their research ecosystem. Beginning in 2015, we introduced Figshare and Dimensions as data sources – enabling integration between Elements and Figshare for Institutions, and providing a powerful source of grants and patent data via Dimensions.

As Symplectic, Figshare and Dimensions are all part of Digital Science, our product and implementation teams are able to collaborate seamlessly in order to provide a joined-up experience for our clients that utilises common technologies and processes. However, we never mandate that clients only use our chosen platforms and continue to provide support for alternative third-parties. Symplectic has always prioritised openness and interoperability, and is proud to say we offer the widest range of data sources in the industry for Symplectic Elements – going beyond just publications metadata and capturing citations, altmetrics, and other research metrics as well as direct links to open access files.

The Research Excellence Framework is a UK-wide process of expert review designed to assess the quality of research in UK higher education institutions, and contemporaneous to ERA (Excellence Research for Australia) in Australia, or the PBRF (Performance Based Research Fund) in New Zealand. For HEIs in the UK, the REF is not only a part of securing funding and demonstrating societal impact, but also a key contributor to an institution’s reputational ability to attract a high calibre of talent and knowledge across faculty, students and researchers.

The REF was first carried out in 2014, replacing the previous Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

Symplectic worked closely with a REF steering committee made up of 11 UK-based higher educational institutions, representing a variety of sizes and disciplines, in order to identify and explore their needs. Steering committee participants were University of Exeter, Anglia Ruskin University, Loughborough University, University of Liverpool, University of Oxford, University of Sheffield, London South Bank University, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, Liverpool John Moores University, and University London, and included stakeholders across IT, business departments, the library and the research office.

Symplectic staff worked with members of the committee in a highly consultative, collaborative manner to define scope and priorities, benefiting from the deep domain experience of our clients in the research community and providing a forum for open discussion and knowledge sharing.

The result is a powerful workflow management tool built on top of the Assessment Module in Symplectic Elements, which acts as a full submission preparation and management tool for all research outputs and staff information required as part of the REF exercise.

The California Digital Library (CDL), in conjunction with University of California campus partners, selected Symplectic as the vendor to implement a publication harvesting system in support of the UC Open Access Policy, passed by the Academic Senate in July 2013. University of California was an early proponent of Open Access, launching its eScholarship repository in 2002 to enable researchers to have direct control over access to their work.

Following the implementation of Elements as a route to deposit publications, CDL has seen exponential growth in the amount of deposits into eScholarship – which this year also celebrates its 20th anniversary! eScholarship serves as the institutional repository for the ten University of California campuses and affiliated research centers.

The Ohio Department of Higher Education together with eight participating universities launched the Ohio Innovation Exchange (OIEx) in 2018, built upon Symplectic Elements and Dimensions and designed with the specific goal to connect Ohio’s academic experts with business and industry to drive innovation.

As of today, OIEx provides an openly accessible platform featuring profiles of over 10,000 STEMM-focused faculty experts as well as information about equipment, research support services and intellectual property (IP) from across the higher education system in Ohio. OIEx provides extensive search functionality and an intuitive interface, which allows visitors to find relevant experts and explore each institution’s publications, patents and equipment. It also facilitates connections with the OIEx human network, a team of university-embedded, industry liaisons who help visitors find more information and build strategic partnerships with researchers and institutions.

Following the publication of new guidelines ahead of REF2021, the steering committee and wider Symplectic community once again convened to set priorities, including a major rethink on how best to capture metadata to fit the new process. The Symplectic team worked in an iterative manner that would allow institutions to begin collecting and curating assessment information as early as possible while awaiting the release of updated data structures from Research England. New functionality was released every 6 weeks, following an agile methodology. For each release, Symplectic’s Senior Product Manager and REF project lead Manya Buchan held a client seminar in order to describe new implementations, field questions and take feedback, ensuring that user adoption and community engagement remained high through the process.