Our March release is filled with improvements to Elements including lots of new features developed in response to popular feature requests and feedback from our community!
The Object details page (eg. Publication details, Grant details) is one of the most heavily used pages in Elements. It supports the curation and enrichment of the many works, activities and resources collected within Elements, and plays a key role in many workflows across the system, supporting open access deposits, annual reviews, internal reporting, national assessment exercises and more. It was time for us to give this hard-working page an update, so in this release we’ve done just that, redesigning the page to make UX enhancements, accessibility improvements and to introduce a number of new features as requested by our community.
We take data privacy very seriously and continue to prioritise and balance flexibility with fine-tuned control and we’ve made several updates in this release to ensure that privacy information is as clear as possible and easy to update. In our new blog, you can read guidance from Oklahoma State University on what to take into account when thinking about privacy in Research Management Systems.
One of the key strengths of Elements is our wide range of external data source integrations which both help to automate the collection of data and to ensure data is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. A number of data sources (including Web of Science, Dimensions and Figshare) have recently released updated APIs, so we’ve updated our integrations to ensure continuity of service and to ensure we continue to offer the richest metadata possible. Several of these data sources do plan to retire their older APIs so it is important that you upgrade Elements before the older APIs are deprecated to maintain continued service. Please see the full release notes for more guidance.
We continue to evolve and grow our Research Funding Solution. In this release, to support the reuse of grant information across as many activities as possible, we have introduced a new suite of functionality for managing and showcasing awarded grants, automatically creating Awarded Grant records when a project is activated within the Research Funding Solution. The new Award Grant records are then available for use across the system in reports & CVs, on Discovery and other public profiles as well as in Assessments and other reporting exercises.
We’ve also made a number of other updates to Elements in response to popular feature requests including:
- A new feature which allows administrators to lock object types on specific objects, preventing other users from being able to make changes.
- New functionality to capture the ‘Corresponding author’, ‘First author’, and/or ‘Last author’ for publications within Elements. To streamline the collecting of this data, we have also updated our Dimensions and Web of Science integrations to harvest ‘Corresponding Author’ metadata where available.
- Supporting the configuration of object-level guidance text to appear at the top of the manual entry page for each object type within Elements.
- And more…
For all the details about the release, clients can view the full release notes on the Symplectic support site.