Happy New Year!

LLC Research Services would like to wish all our colleagues at the University a very Happy New Year. We hope you enjoyed a restful, festive holiday and are now looking forward to the new year ahead. Last year presented challenges to everyone but our team was determined to improve our existing services and to respond to requests to deliver more.

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So here’s what 2021 meant for us:

We continued to provide service support for staff using the Discovery Portal and the Pure software that underpins it. This included processing over 250 open access payments on behalf of staff to ensure immediate online access to their research.

We oversaw the creation of, and validated, over 3600 research output records and provided support to the community to create over 1400 activity records.

We validated over 130 PGR theses and introduced services such as the addition of copyright or creative commons licenses to the Discovery records to affirm our student’s ownership of their work. This service is also being enhanced through the application of DOIs to PGR theses with a view to increased attribution and citation. This is an addition to the existing DOI minting service which saw our team generate 34 DOIs for a variety of other works such as datasets, reports and comics.

We contacted and welcomed over 150 new members of staff, offering them one-to-one tailored research support, continuing with our introduction and welcome meetings online.

Facilitated access to Discovery to an additional 600 academic-related staff to encourage recognition of their contribution to research, teaching and public engagement.

Introduced services which ensure that outputs, projects and personal profiles are tagged with the UN SDGs, with additional support for reporting at both School and institutional levels.

Built a new resource – the Open Research Sharepoint site to provide as much information as possible in one place for our academic and professional services colleagues.

Then there was the small matter of the REF submission, with our role to make sure open access compliance was met for all research outputs, provide accurate metadata in Discovery, inform on open access practices for the environment statements, purchase content for physical and digital submission and to help collate evidence for multi-component outputs and impact case studies, as well as uploading all of the relevant data to the REF Submission System.

We’ve also developed and delivered some new services by collecting and repurposing additional data as part of our open access processes. These includes the addition of Facilities to Discovery to aid with funder reporting on their use. By collecting more details about funders we can also support the ResearchFish submission by pre-populating the system with output data.

We ran a pilot with colleagues from ESW to deliver a new open access journal, IJELT, which will formally launch in the new year.

We also supported 25 staff with preparation and review of their Data Management Planning (DMPs) ensuring that their research data was managed according to their funder and institutional expectations.

And finally, and by no means least, we worked on new services for secure access to research data. In April we secured Assured Organisational Connectivity (AOC) to the Secure Research Service (SRS). SRS provides accredited researchers secure access to de-identified, unpublished data. In November we welcomed the SafePod installation team. A physical installation during current restrictions provided its own challenges but the team are really excited to see the SafePod installed in the LLC and look forward to announcing the launch of the SafePod in the new year!

We’re feeling very pleased that we’ve been able to deliver so many new services and maintain existing ones but none of these would have been possible without the support of our LLC colleagues, the Research Systems team in IT, Registry Records, Estates and Buildings staff and many others.

We’re looking forward to working with you all in 2022!

LLC Research Services (aka The Discovery Team).