Academic institutions often choose to postpone the decision to move to a professional Research Information Management System (RIMS), instead continuing to invest in home-grown systems. Switching to a new system can be daunting, leading institutions to avoid investing time and money and instead sticking with what they have – a “better the devil you know” mentality. However, older and home-grade systems become outdated fast, are cost-intensive to maintain and do not always integrate with bibliometric metadata. A stepwise, incremental migration is a viable option and Symplectic Elements supports a modular implementation.
We discussed with our first Austrian customer, Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft, why they took the decision to migrate away from their homegrown system, why they chose Symplectic Elements as a next-generation RIMS and what their experience was of implementation.
Could you tell us a bit about the history and structure of Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft?
Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft (LBG) is a non-university research organisation that partners with universities to produce research collaborations outside of the university structures. Most institutes are partners with universities or university hospitals. The areas of research are Medicine and Health Studies, Humanities and Social Sciences, though the research focus and nature of each institute is quite varied.
How was the process of documenting research outputs organised before? Which challenges did LBG experience?
When Patrick Lehner joined LBG, there was no database where all publications produced could be collected centrally. We managed data through an exchange of Excel Sheets with institutes; staff collected Excel files, and then we processed them in a program that would read and combine data from reports. We didn’t know what was behind the research output, and the amount and type of research produced was not transparent to us. Institutions provided an approximate figure of papers produced only, e.g. 5 journal articles or 3 books, without the details or metadata.
How often would you analyse research outputs?
We would collect all the data and review publications once in a year. All in all this triggered a review of the current process.
Moving to a professional RIMS: what was stopping LBG before and what was the driving force for making the change
We had several investments in IT infrastructure and we had an ongoing discussion about investing in RIMS. We realised RIMS are quite an investment and therefore we postponed the decision to move to one.
However, there was a crucial moment where I presented bibliometric analysis of research outputs at LBG in the last 10 years – this was provided by Leiden university, not by us. We presented it to the board and a decision was made that we should not invest in developing our own RIMS, but license from a commercial solution.
Why did you decide to go with the solution provided by Symplectic Elements?
We decided to go ahead with Symplectic Elements for a number of different reasons. For one, because of how Elements is situated within Digital Science and has integrations with other very innovative products, such as Dimensions and Altmetric. The history of how Symplectic Elements emerged as a spin-off from academia as it was developed at Imperial College London was something that also strongly resonated with us it did not have a major commercial driver behind it in the form of a large publisher.
It also offered good value for the price! Lots of our institutions are in the Health field and Elements is already integrated well with PubMed without us needing to integrate with a commercial bibliographic database – this offered a huge cost benefit for us. That was why we made the decision to go ahead with Symplectic Elements, as the core functionality alone without further integration offered great benefits for our institutions.
What was the beginning of the implementation? Did you have any internal change processes that preceded implementation of Symplectic Elements?
In the beginning we looked at HR data and we had a big project to move to a professional HR database. It would not have made sense to rollout Elements with Dimensions integration if we don’t have the interface with an internal HR database.
Why did you decide to take an incremental approach to implementation?
This approach was connected to the specific nature of LBG as an organisation: we consist of multiple institutes and often researchers are also professors at other universities. Therefore we took a careful approach to implementation before going public, as these researchers produce research outputs at the university as well as at LBG and there was hesitation to populate data in two systems.
What was your experience with technical and customer support that you received during the implementation?
We had a great experience with Symplectic throughout the implementation, with regular meetings, and support in German thanks to the regional support person being based in Austria. We have had continuous assistance, dealing with all the questions around HR data integration, providing expert answers in a timely manner.
It took us quite a long time due to internal changes – particularly as we moved from one HR system to another, we had internal delays from our side – but we were always very well supported by Symplectic during the implementation process.
Where does Elements stand now in the organisation and what is the future vision for it?
Currently we have rolled it out not as mandatory, but optional for researchers, so they can populate their profiles as and when they have time. We have an upstream system (HR system) and we are building a downstream system (data about the research projects, budgets and outputs), and Elements should feed into that. By the time the downstream system is built, we expect Elements to be more heavily used and therefore to be more fully populated with data. Elements will be adopted for internal reporting and eventually linked to researchers’ external websites. Once this feature is available, we expect better completeness of data on research outputs and academic curriculums on researcher profiles in Elements.. That will provide a good impetus for other researchers to curate their profiles and have up-to-date profiles.
We are also now thinking about Dimensions, as we are in the position to discuss an integration and fully benefit from both systems.
