Symplectic was founded with the aim of reducing the administrative burden on researchers, in order to help them get on with doing what they're best at - research.

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physics (Daniel Hook, John Fearns, Marko Ivin & Phil Parkin), who were frustrated by the experience of using outdated, fragmented systems while working on their PhDs.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.

John Fearns: "Theoretical physics can get quite lonely! Collaborating with colleagues, focusing on real world tasks and sharing the success is a way of working I much prefer."

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!

John Fearns: "Elements began with helping academics tell their university what they're doing; you don't want to be spending all day filling out sheets when you can click a button and do it in two minutes - that's exactly where (and why) we entered the market."

Digital Science is launched out of Nature Publishing Group

As the Project Babbage team toasted the launch with champagne in the atrium of the Nature building, Symplectic's co-founders were upstairs in the board room finally signing investment paperwork. Accordingly, Symplectic became part of the Digital Science family in 2011 - soon to be followed by many more!

With Open Access becoming an increasingly important driver in both Europe and Australia, Symplectic expanded its 'open access awareness' beyond DSpace integration, introducing the 'Repository Tools' module in 2011 to enable integration with institutional repositories (including Figshare for Institutions, EPrints and Hyrax) in order to drive open access initiatives. Elements now had the ability to identify publications and outputs that were eligible for institutional or governmental open access policies and flag them for deposit, helping to guide researchers to take easy action at the push of a button. We also introduced functionality allowing administrators to act on behalf of researchers, giving multiple routes toward Open Access compliance.

The introduction of the OA Monitor within Elements in 2015 went a step further, letting institutions easily monitor and report on their researchers' levels of engagement or compliance levels. Using the OA Monitor, administrators could now filter publications by parameters to review progress, record exceptions, and track library status.

Symplectic becomes part of Digital Science

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.

In 2012, Symplectic took another big global step with its first client in North America, Duke University. Not only did Duke implement Elements as a research information management system, it also integrated with its DSpace repository - DukeSpace - and worked with Symplectic to create Scholars@Duke, an implementation of VIVO. Scholars@Duke is a researcher expertise portal which publicly features the scholarly, research, and activities of Duke faculty and academic staff.

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.

VIVO is an open source semantic web application which - when populated with information from research information management systems such as Elements - builds out discoverable public profiles for institutional researchers. Symplectic worked closely with VIVO for many years, supporting VIVO conferences and launching many public institutional discovery portals (also known as Expert Finder Systems, or Faculty Information Systems) built upon the technology integration. In 2014, Symplectic was proud to become the first Registered Service Provider for the VIVO project, and continues to integrate with VIVO for a number of clients to this day - while other institutions now choose to utilise Symplectic's own Discovery Module (introduced 2019 following community feedback) in order to seamlessly populate public-facing profiles.

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.

Carnegie Mellon University elected to roll out Symplectic Elements, Dimensions, Figshare for Institutions, and Altmetric Explorer, with public researcher profiles surfaced using the Symplectic Discovery module through Scholars@CMU. The use cases include service tracking, faculty annual reviews, publications monitoring, public directory, custom reporting, data visualization and analysis, data feeds to external websites, open access research and scholarship, data migration from historical systems, researcher identity management, and mapping faculty research to Sustainable Development Goals.

Powerful bidirectional integration with Figshare means that researchers could deposit via either Elements or directly to Figshare. Publications deposited directly into Figshare are then automatically harvested by Elements, creating a new record or and being linked to an existing record - retaining a consistent, comprehensive and current picture of all of a researcher's publications.

Integrating with Dimensions offered the first fully searchable grants data source for Symplectic Elements and automatically created links between publications and grants. Dimensions is the only Elements data source that can harvest records for both publications (including preprints) and grants, and, in addition, create links between the two. Dimensions also disambiguates authors automatically and provides researcher IDs which can be used to automatically claim publications and grants.

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 success of showcasing academic experts in public profiles as part of the OIEx project, Symplectic introduced the Discovery Module in 2019 to provide a public portal for institutional researchers and faculty that could be seamlessly populated from within Elements.

The Discovery Module repurposes the rich and often unique data already collected within Elements to populate fully-rounded profiles including biographical information as well as publications, grants and professional & teaching activities. The Discovery Module aims to make your researchers and their expertise as discoverable as possible. The popularity of the Discovery Module grew quickly, with 46 institutional instances either live or being implemented as of 2022, including Virginia Tech, Victoria University of Wellington, University College Dublin and the National University of Singapore.

The Discovery Module continues to expand the types of objects it can showcase in order to reflect the changing approach to how institutional "expertise" is defined, introducing Equipment profiles in 2021 to support industry-leaders such as Ohio Innovation Exchange and Victoria University of Wellington, and evolving to encompass technologies, services, and patents.

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.

As of 2023, our evolving mission now can be broken down into 6 core areas of focus:

We seek to:

• Relieve Administrative Burden & Empower Researchers
  We free up researchers and administrators in the research office and grants teams to concentrate on value-add activities rather than manual admin, giving them more time to spend on what's important.
• Drive & Support Collaboration & Innovation
  We help researchers find mentors, collaborators, scientific equipment and other institutional research services - helping them do their research better and driving better cross-pollination of knowledge across disciplines.
• Enable Funding of Research
  We help research funders manage their grants award processes and grants applicants build the best applications We help research funders manage their grants award processes and grants applicants build the best applications
• Enable Open Access for the Benefit of All
  We make it easier for researchers and institutions to make their publications & data open access, making knowledge more widely accessible for all (including developing countries).
• Gain Insight & Track the Impact of Research Done
  Powerful reporting tools help organisations track KPIs, monitor progress on things like how much of research is actively contributing to initiatives such as SDGs or Open Access workflows, or analyse and understand the impact of grants and funds allocated and research carried out.
• Promote Research Excellence
  The Elements assessment module makes it easier for institutions to assess and demonstrate research excellence, through activities such as the Research Excellence Framework in the UK, PBRF in New Zealand, ERA in Australia, and Faculty Annual Reporting (FAR). This helps to ensure that research and teaching carried out is of the highest quality.