4th Annual Conference

Symplectic had their 4th annual user conference, on Monday 21st May at Hamilton House (NUT) on Mabledon Place, London, WC1H 9BD.

We had some great guest speakers this year and would like to thank them for making it out to talk to us. To view the slides from each talk please head over to support.

Dr. Michael Conlon

Dr. Conlon is Associate Director and Chief Operating Officer of the University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Director of Biomedical Informatics, UF College of Medicine, and Principal Investigator of the NIH project “VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists.” His responsibilities include development of academic biomedical informatics, expansion and integration of research and clinical information resources and strategic planning for academic health and university research.  As PI of the VIVO project, Dr. Conlon leads a team of investigators in the development, implementation and advancement of an open source, semantic web application for research discovery.  He earned his Ph.D. degree in Statistics from the University of Florida, undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Economics from Bucknell University, and is the author of over 150 scholarly publications and presentations.  His current interests include enterprise change and organizational issues in the adoption of information technology, and the development of research capacity across the translational spectrum.

Paul Foeckler

Paul Foeckler is one of the Mendeley founders in charge of various aspects of product development. He graduated from the Bauhaus-University Weimar in September 2006 studying Computer Science / Media System Science. Prior to Mendeley which he founded with his friends Jan Reichelt (MBA) and Dr. Victor Henning (MBA) at the end of 2007, Paul worked at the intersection between business and technology in various internet startups in Germany and London and was doing consulting work for web projects of the UK Film Council among others.

Timo Hannay

Timo Hannay is Managing Director of Digital Science, a division of Macmillan Publishers. He previously worked at Nature Publishing Group, where he was director of nature.com. In his former lives, Timo was a research neurophysiologist (in Oxford and Tokyo), a journalist (at The Economist and Nature) and a management consultant (at McKinsey & Co.).

With this partnership, we have the opportunity to position ourselves as
a world leader in the development of the scholarly ecosystem.

Keith Webster, Dean of University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon

I cannot overstate how pleased we have been.
We have to have confidence to work with a partner
for at least 5 years on a project of this size.

Caleb Smith, Senior Strategy Manager for Research Intelligence & Analytics, University of Michigan

“Faculty need only spend perhaps less than an hour a year to prepare and submit their annual reports.”

Associate Dean, Carnegie Mellon University at Qatar

"Leveraging the interoperability between Symplectic Elements and DSpace has increased policy-driven institutional repository deposits by over 350%."

Ellen Phillips, Open Access Specialist, Boston University

Elements elegantly connected our multi-university system providing a
single source of truth throughout OIEx.

Tim Cain, The Ohio Innovation Exchange (OIEx)

The University measures the individual research activity of academic staff. This Measure of Research Activity (MoRA) requires the collection of publication data from faculty. Symplectic Elements supports this beautifully.

Floris van der Leest, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

[Elements] will help to bring transparency to the richness of thought showcased within non-traditional publications, providing a more holistic representation of faculties’ scholarly work.

Caleb Smith, University of Michigan

Feedback to date has been extremely positive from all levels across the University, with individual academics and colleagues actively promoting the ease of use of the system.

Rachel Baird, Research Policy Analyst, University of Liverpool