Functionality

System functionality, User functionality, Research management and support functionality, Library functionality, Administrator Functionality, Bibliometric functionality, Repository functionality, Portal functionality

User functionality

Eskild, Jakob, and Michael all use Pure's User Functionality

Source	Description	Standardised	License
PubMed	Online source	Yes	Not required
Web of Science	Online source	Yes	Required
ArXiv	Online source	Yes	Not required
Scopus	Online source	Yes	Required
BibTex	File source	Yes	Not required
RefMan	File source	Yes	Not required
RIS	File source	Yes	Not required
JournalTOCs	File source	Yes	Not required

New sources are continuously added, please inquire

The result of an import is a rich publication record in Pure with all bibliographic metadata from the source, correct relations to all internal authors, correct relations to all related organisations (e.g. school, institute, department), correct relations to one or more projects, and all primary journal information (ISSN, publishing date, etc.). If the user wishes, one or more full-text files can be added. Also URLs can be added by the user as can Bibliographic notes and additional relations. With the UK datamodel, Impact cases can be added directly at this point (REF-specific feature), and the user can also decide if the imported publication should be publicly available, or if it should have limited availability.

Requires the Self-import module. Please also see Automated bulk imports below for a description of Pure's bulk-import feature. Finally, more information is available in the Pure4 White-paper.

CVs

Pure's CV functionality makes it possible for researchers to create an unlimited number of CVs for different purposes: One for students, one for grant applications, one focusing on esteem, etc. The researcher can let a CV include any individual piece of content; Publications, Projects, Grant performances, Activities and Esteems, Co-authors, Bibliometrics, etc. Each CV can be printed or set to appear online. The latter option will make the CV appear on the researcher's profile page on PurePortal. Criteria can also be defined for a CV; e.g. Include all peer-reviewed publications or Include only cited publications, etc. When criteria is used, CVs will automatically update when new content is added to Pure, which match the criteria.

This ability to manage different CVs and effortlessly print and publish them online was requested by researchers, and it has become an important part of Pure's value-proposition to researchers.
Requires the CV module.

Trusted users

Any user can let another user assume responsibility for him or her for periods of time. This is useful in case of annual leaves, maternity leaves, sickness, travel, and so on: Any task to the first user will automatically be redirected to the assisting user. This functionality is also used in situations, where high-ranking institutional managers with extensive rights in Pure wishes to let administrative staff help out with everyday tasks.

Research management and support functionality

Kirsten, Eskild, and Nils use Pure's Research management and -support functions from different organisational positions

Award functionality

An institution can choose to use Pure's basic award functionality as described below or any external, full-featured pre-award system that it prefers. If an external system is used, integration will be set up with that system in order to continuously have all relevant award data in Pure. That will ensure the ability to query and report on pre-award data in relation with other data in Pure like Publications, Researchers, Departments, etc.

One reason for using Pure's pre-award functionality is that most of the information, which a researcher needs for a grant application, already is in Pure in high data-quality. Another reason is, that researchers are able to access Pure themselves; not all 3rd party award systems can easily be accessed by researchers.

In order to support a researcher in writing an application for funding, Pure can have a special report named after each funding agency or funding programme: RCUK, DFG, FP7, etc. These reports can be maintained by the institution itself: It will be possible for administrators to modify any report and to create new ones according to new and changing requirements from funding organisations.

A researcher or another person making funding applications (e.g. staff from your a funding office) will be able to run the report. By running the report, a Word-file (or other text-editor format) will be generated, which includes all data from Pure, which is relevant on the funding application: Persons, CVs, Organisations, publication lists, previous application successes, other esteem, previous projects, etc. All information will be output to Word (or other text-editor) in the correct order, and the researcher or other person making the funding application will be able to continue working on the application in Word (or other editor text editor).

A funding object can be created in Pure, which will include detailed information about the funding such as funding organisation (relation), programme (relation), amount applied for, description, person- and organisation information (relations), expected outcome, expected project start and end-date, and so on.
The relevant funding organisation can be chosen. The same is true for external organisations, sponsors, etc. What information can be added on the funding object can be customised according to individual requests. The person applying for funding will also be in the funding object by a relation to hit or her profile in Pure (which is a person-object).

The funding object can be in different process-stages (being written, has been submitted, being processed, closed, etc.) and when it is finished, it can be in two different result-categories: Granted or Not Granted.

Funding objects will be subject to appropriate security measures in Pure.

Integration to external award systems and similar

It is possible to integrate Pure with one or more financial systems, costing systems, an/or pre- and post-award systems. Such integration will facilitate:

Actual funding amounts on funding objects in Pure
Actual spending on projects and activities in Pure
Relations between funding objects and projects/activities
Newly funded projects and activities will automatically be created in Pure from the financial system with the correct relations

Reporting with award data in Pure

The setup above will leave pure financial reporting to the financial system, but it will facilitate reporting in Pure, which combines applications, successes, amounts, funding sources, internal applications and their organisations with research outputs such as publications, patents, activity results, impacts, etc.

Please note that while the pre-award datamodel concept are ready for use, parts of Pures pre-award functionality has not yet been released.

More information is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Enrichment and Validation

Content created by one user can be enriched or validated by one or more other users: An incomplete publication from a researcher can be completed by administrative staff, for example, or administrative staff can create a publication, which then can be validated by the researcher. Other examples with other types of content would be valid too - projects or esteem, for example, or the complex internal deliberations that will precede returns the national assessment exercises such as the REF in the UK. This is all achieved using Pure's Workflows.

Enrichment or validation is usually done by a user with the Editor-role (see Roles and Rights), also referred to simply as Editors. Wherever there is a workflow, there will also be an Editor. If your Pure-system has a Publication-workflow, you will also have a Publication Editor. Several users within an organisation can be editors, and editors can be appointed at any level in the organisational hierarchy; e.g., university, school, faculty, institute, department, etc. One editor can also have responsibilities for several or all organisations, if desired. More complex workflows can also be set up involving multiple workflow-steps and multiple roles.

Detailed rules can determine what is required before a piece of content is allowed to the next step in the workflow, and messages can be sent with every workflow-step to clarify what the next role is expected to do, or to explain what a previous role will have to rectify.

More information is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Revalidation

Normally, a piece of content that had already been validated through a workflow would be locked - the originating user would not be able to edit it anymore. The rationale is that once content is approved, it should not be altered. However, Administrators can turn on Pure's Revalidation feature. It allows the originating user to change any value on the content in question; in case of a publication the title, abstract, author-list, etc. Once changed, Pure will automatically send the publication through the same workflow it went through the first time, and the same personnel will validate it again. To make it easy for the other users to re-validate the content, it is clearly marked as being revalidated, and the actual changes are shown in red.

Please also see Additional system settings under Administrator functionality.

Reports

Using Pure's Reporting module, it is possible to report on all content in Pure: Publications, Projects, Activities, Organisations, Persons, Journals, Publishers, External Organisations, Users, Impact cases, and so on. Reports can include lists, tables, analyses, and graphs. Detailed filtering criteria can be defined for each list, table, analysis, or graph: Citations can be used as criteria when creating a list of publications, for example, the number of research students can be used when calculating a number of researchers, or publication types can be used when creating a graph about output from a specific organisation. Further, lists and analysis can be grouped differently. A publication list can be grouped by Year, for example, by Authors, or by Organisation. To that, mathematical functions can be set for analyses. All options for filtering, grouping, and setting functions are presented to the user, when the report is being made.

One report can contain multiple lists, analysis and graphs about any number of content types. They will just be represented as multiple sections in the finished report. This is also referred to as compound reports. An example would be that one report could include a) a list of Persons from a specific Organisation, b) then a table showing publication types by authors, c) then an analysis of citations per author over time, and d) finally a graph showing Peer-reviewed publications versus non-reviewed.

You can set relevant output formats for each content type. For Publication lists, for example, you can choose HARVARD, Vancouver, CBE, MLA, etc. For graphs, different chart types can be chosen. To that, all reports can be output as PDF-files, as HTML for viewing on-screen only, for further use in Word and Excel and similar desktop application.

Format	Description	Standardised
PDF	General output format, used when distributing reports automatically to recipients	Yes
HTML	For viewing on-screen	Yes
RTF	Rich Text Format, used for working with the reporting result in Word, OpenOffice, Pages, etc.	Yes
CSV	Comma Separated Values, used for working with the reporting result in Excel, OpenOffice, Numbers, etc.	Yes

Report output formats

Users can make all-new reports, or they can copy and modify existing reports and save them with another name. Reports can be kept personal or made available for other user. If made available to others, they must have a short description added in the relevant user languages.

Demo.report

132.53 Kb , PDF format

A report can be scheduled to run at a specified date and time. It can also be set to run with regular intervals; weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. Further, a report can have a recipient list set up; a list of e-mail addresses and names whereto the report automatically will be distributed when it has run. These are useful features in many situations; supplying research managers with regular status information, for example.

Finally, reporting is subject to the same Roles/Rights model and the same content access strategies in Pure, which regulate all content access in other situations as well. This means that users will have only access to run a report if they also have sufficient access to the content that the report would include. This is checked before the user even sees the report: Users will only see reports they can run.

Among other things, Malene and Anne Marya manage keyword taxonomies, handle dupliactes, and run bulk-imports

Library functionality

Duplicate handling

Pure uses several measures to avoid duplicates in the first place. It is not possible to import a publication twice from Web of Science or PubMed, for example. Further, Pure has functionality for finding and showing duplicate Publications, Publishers, and Journals, and for deleting or merging duplicate objects.

When merging, one of the objects in the duplicate set is chosen to be the destination of the merge operation. It is normally the one with the best data, that is chosen as destination. Empty fields on the destination object will automatically be populated with values from the same fields on the non-destination objects, if they have any values.

The result of the merge operation in this example is one publication, which is uniquely identified in Pure, which holds all data from all former duplicates, and which is correctly related to all other objects in Pure (e.g. Persons (authors), Projects, Organisations, etc.).

To summarise, Pure automatically avoids duplicates where possible, it provides both manual and automated identification of duplicates, and it facilitates clean-up of duplicates by delete- and merge-operations.

More information about this subject is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Automated bulk imports

With the Self-import module, bulk imports can be set up to run automatically from the modules supported sources:

The purpose is to regularly and automatically import the bibliographic records, which belong to the organisation. The desired source or sources must be selected, and an import interval must be set for each of these sources. Pure will then analyse each source according to the criteria and import new bibliographic records with the desired intervals. Once imported, the records can be left in Pure as they are, or they can be enriched and validated in a workflow by specified users in Pure.

Requires the Self-import module. More information about this subject is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Source	Bulk import	Standardised	License
PubMed	Yes	Yes	Not required
Web of Science	Yes	Yes	Required
ArXiv	Yes	Yes	Not required
Scopus	Yes	Yes	Required
BibTex	No	Yes	Not required
RefMan	No	Yes	Not required
JournalTOCs	No	Yes	Not required

Automated bulk import can be set up from these sources

Classifications

Classifications are values that will appear in drop-down menus or selection boxes for users to chose from. They are arranged in classification schemes. One purpose of using classifications is to replace free-text options for improved data quality, improved consistency, and improved user-interaction. Another is to facilitate the use of fixed vocabularies where appropriate according to institutional policies.

It is possible to set up a central taxonomy or keyword list describing the institution's research areas and disciplines. Such a taxonomy can be hierarchical, and it can include unlimited values at each level. It can be one of the standard ones such as Dewey or Ortelius, or it can be proprietary for the institution; written at the library, for example. Users can add values from such a central taxonomy to anything in Pure - publications, projects, person profiles, etc.

Content that was tagged from a fixed taxonomy can be browsed hierarchically by keywords on PurePortal or on own Pure-fed web pages. This is particularly useful for guests coming from outside the university environment; private sector companies, the media, etc. Further, such keywords can be used as criteria in Reports. This is true both with system classifications and self-defined classifications.

Pure's classification editor allows all classifications to be managed by relevant staff members independently of consultants. Administrators or librarians typically do this. They can create new classifications, delete existing classifications, and change, and merge classifications. Whenever existing classifications are changed, Pure will automatically reclassify existing content in the database accordingly.
More information about this subject is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Management of Publishers and Journals

As described in Roles and Rights above, Publishers and Journals are managed in Pure by Global Editors: Users with special rights to create, edit, and delete these two content types.

Press clippings

Specialised press monitoring agencies in Europe and the UK offer a service, by which press clippings about universities and similar institutions are gathers and provided as an XML data feed. If an institution subscribes to such a feed, it is possible to have Pure automatically import press clippings and relate them to the researchers, publications, schools/faculties/institutes/departments, or projects that is mentioned. The benefit is, that press clippings become an integrated part of Pure's data set, allowing web exhibition of press clippings (e.g. showing all of a researcher's press on his or her profile) and reporting about press coverage (e.g. which researcher/school/institute/department/project is most in the press, which media covers the institution best or worst).

Requires the Press Clippings module. More information is also available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Student thesis

Functionality in Pure allows submission of student theses through PurePortal or through a web form on the institutions own web pages or a student internet. Date- and time-stamped certification can be sent to a student administration system verifying the submission, and both metadata and full-text can be used in reports or made publicly available online. Relations will exist between a student thesis and the professors supervising the student, which allows reporting or online listing of theses per professor. Students' submissions can be validated in a workflow involving their professors and/or administrative staff at the student administration office.

Not relevant with all standard data-models. Requires the Student Theses module. More information is also available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Nils and Kasper administrate users, and they overview and plan synchronisations with other systems by use of Pure's Systems Integration Management tools

Administrator functionality

User administration

Administrators manage users in Pure.

Users can be created or deleted, roles and rights can be assigned and revoked, etc. This work is done by administrators in the administrator section of Pure's user-interface.

Users can be created automatically by the integration to the HR system, and depending on the HR system, roles and rights can also be assigned automatically. Alternatively, administrators can manage users manually from within the user-interface of Pure.

Systems Integration Management

During implementation, integrations are set up in Pure with each external system necessary for full production. Usually, integrations are set up with systems for synchronisation of data such as Organisations, Persons, Projects, or Students, but also External Organisations, and Persons as well as Publishers and Journals can come from outside systems (please also see Systems integration). Functionally in Pure's administration section is available for managing these integrations: Administrators can schedule integration jobs, monitor, stop and start jobs, revert to previous stages, access and analyse job performance logs, and set so-called safeSizes for each job.

More information is also available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Audit log

All events by all users are systematically logged in Pure. Creating, retrieving, changing, deleting, viewing, or reporting on content is logged as well as any use of functionality. Users' IDs are logged with a timestamp as well as information about the action carried out. If content is changed, the actual change is also logged. If a project title is changed, for example, the log will show the title before and after for that content ID, what user made the change, at what time it was made, and by what event type (change content in this case). Administrators can filter Pures audit log, and several filters can be active simultaneously:

Filter by	Description
User ID	Show all events by that user
Content ID	Show all events carried out on specific content
Event type	Show all events of a specific type; e.g. “delete”
Time period	Show all events within a specific period
Free text searching	Search the log by free text

Administrators' Audit log filtering options

Messages and text resources

Pure comes with a number of default system messages (please see Tasks and messages). Administrators can change system messages to meet new requirements, and administrators can also set up new system messages for new situations and they can send messages ad hoc for different purposes. Text resources is a common term describing all help pages, context-sensitive help texts, and all use of text in the user-interface (e.g. field-labels). All Pure's text resources can be modified by administrators. Administrators can also create new help-pages and context-sensitive help pop-ups, depending on local needs. Finally, Pure's main Error Page can be modified by Administrators. The main Error Page is shown when Pure is not available; for example during planned downtime for service-work.

More information about this subject is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Support user

Administrators can look up any user in the entire system and assume his or her role. The result is, that the administrator's screen will look like the assumed user role and offer the administrator the ability to interact with Pure just as the assumed user role would be able to. This is also called supporting the user. When the administrator is done, he or she will leave support-mode whereby the normal administrator screen will reappear. This feature is practical for a number of purposes, including actual live support of users in need of guidance. Help-desk staff at larger institutions is usually granted the ability to perform such support operations, which makes it possible for the user requesting support to sit back and view a specific operation being carried out by support staff while listening to them on the telephone.

Guest Access

A small but practical administration feature in Pure is the ability to temporarily allow guest users in the system. External users can request access. Administrators will be notified, and they can then either authorise or reject the request. If the request is authorised, the administrators will determine how the guest user is granted access by setting one or more roles and one or more organisations for the guest user. Guest access can be set to automatically expire after a certain period and can also easily be prolonged or made permanent.

Additional system settings

Additional system settings can be managed by administrators, five are described briefly below:

Functionality is available for managing the Self-import sources in Pure; sources like Web of Science, Scopus, ArXiv, PubMed, etc. Some sources require virtually no management, while others require setting of Web-Service URLs, setting of authentication information, etc. For Web of Science, specifically, a search URL can be set, an authentication URL can be set, and the Edition to be accessed can be specified (e.g. SCI, SSCI, AHCI, ISTP). Please see Self-import and Automated bulk imports for a full description of Pure's Self-import functionality. Pure's re-indexing feature makes on-demand re-indexing available for administrators from the System settings menu. Further, Pure's sending of e-mail is set up and handled by administrators here; reply-to address, host, port, and a dedicated Pure support-mail address can be set.

To that, The basic PurePortal (see Portal functionality) can be managed by administrators. It can be turned on or off, and a number of other settings can be managed. Finally, Pure's feature for revalidation can be turned on or off by administrators. Many Pure-owners prefer to have it turned off for most of the year, but prefer to set it to on during busy periods where many publications are submitted.

Malene imports impact factors and citations and combine with other info in Pure for reporting purposes

Bibliometric functionality

Bibliometricians and managers with similar responsibilities have dedicated functionality available in Pure:

Impact factors and citations

Impact factors can be imported and placed onto Journals in Pure. Matching is done by ISSN numbers. Impact factor data can be exported from Thomson-Reuters' Journal Citation Report (JCR) with a valid license and access to the Web of Knowledge. Exported impact factor data can then be imported by Pure. This can be done as often as preferred: Journals in Pure that already have this information will just be updated, and a log will be kept showing what was updated and when.

Field	Description
Year	Citation data imported from the Web of science(Thomson-Reuters)
Total number of citations
Self citations
Source	The source of the citation set
Date of bibliometric processing	The data the citation set was added

Citation information on publications

Based on a relevant contract with Thomson-Reuters, citation data can also be exported from Web of Science and imported into Pure. Citation data is available for export as the number of citations per year per article. In this case, citation data sets are matched to publications in Pure by Thomson-Reuters publication identifier (UT).

Field	Description
Year	Year of impact
Source	The source of the impact factor data
Cited Half-Life	Impact factor data imported from the Web of science (Thomson-Reuters)
Diacron Impact Factor
Immediacy Index
Local Impact Factor
Syncronous Impact Factor
Imported	The data the citation set was added

Impact factor information on journals

Finally, when importing bibliographic records from Thomson-Reuters Web of Science using Pure's Self-import functionality, citation data will be imported simultaneously. If a publication is imported from WoS that is already in Pure but does not have a UT-number on it, it is possible to merge the two publications using Pure's Duplicate handling tools. A destination-object is pointed out by the user, and the merge operation will result in a new object with the best information from the two previous ones. Pure will automatically update objects with any links to the two old publications so that they instead link with the new one. Similar functionality is available with Scopus and other data suppliers and sources.

More information about this subject is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Bibliometric analyses and data extracts

It is possible to analyse content in Pure by bibliometric data. That is possible when citations and Impact factors have been imported and matched properly to relevant content objects in Pure such as Publications and Journals. Content such as Persons, Projects and Grants can also be analysed by bibliometrics, because this content is related to Publications and Journals. Comparing publications from specific funding bodies by their citation count would be perfectly possible, for example, as would ranking internal authors by the different metrics.

Concretely, Pure supports bibliometricians' work with the ability to set up and run Reports, which analyses bibliometric data or cross-references it with bibliographical data and expresses the results in lists, tables, calculations, and graphs. Such analytical results can be exported as PDF or XML, or as data for further use in Word or Excel. Along with that, bibliometricians can use Pure's Search, filter, list, and export functionality for defining and saving subsets of data.

Please note that bibliometric data from 3rd party suppliers can be subject to usage limitations.

Download statistics

The number of times a publication has been downloaded is a relatively new metric but increasingly requested. Download data can come from several sources: Publishers' electronic journals, Open Access electronic journals, institutional repositories, subject-specific repositories, national repositories, and portals, researchers own web pages, and so on.

In Pure, download metrics are being stored for all publication-types as well as for activities and any other type of content where something would be downloadable; e.g., binary files such as pictures, movies, or sound. It is possible to store the download numbers along with information about their source. This makes it possible to differentiate the weighting of downloads depending on the sources. Download numbers can be imported into Pure just as other bibliometric data. Importing is possible from files and from Web-Services or other online interfaces. Pure will automatically add download numbers from PurePortal if a PurePortal-based website exists. They will be stored with PurePortal as the listed source of origin.

Like with other metrics, download numbers can be used as criteria when analysing other data in Pure. It is possible rank publications by their downloads, for example, but download numbers can also be used as a part in more complex and advanced analyses.

Integration with Thomson-Reuters inCites

Pure comes with standard support for integration with InCites from Thomson-Reuters. This includes data returns.

Assessment functionality

The following description is specific for the Research Assessment Exercise (REF) in the UK as specified by HEFCE. For more information about assessment support outside of the UK, please see the Pure4 white-paper or contact us. Pure also supports the national Danish assessment programme, DASTI's so-called Indicator Project, and the Flemish government's FRIS programme. These programmes are very different, and they are supported in different ways by Pure.

REF assessment concepts

Pure supports each of the REF-concepts as defined by HEFCEs second consultation. The starting point is the Units of Assessment as defined by HEFCE:

Panel	Units of Assessment
Panel A	1. Clinical Medicine 2. Public Health, Health Services and Primary Care 3. Allied Health Professions, Dentistry and Nursing 4. Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience 5. Biological Sciences 6. Pre-clinical, Human Biological and Sports Science 7. Agriculture, Veterinary and Food Science
Panel B	8. Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences 9. Chemistry 10. Physics 11. Mathematics & Statistics 12. Computer Science and Informatics 13. Engineering
Panel C	14. Geography and Environmental Studies 15. Architecture, Built Environment, Town & Country Planning 16. Economics and Econometrics 17. Business and Management Studies 18. Law 19. Politics and International Studies 20. Social Work and Social Policy & Administration 21. Sociology & Anthropology
Panel D	22. Education 23. Area Studies 24. European Languages and Studies 25. English Language and Literature 26. Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies 27. History, Archaeology and Classics 28. Art and Design 29. Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts 30. Library, Information, Communication, Cultural and Media Studies

REF2013 Units of Assessment

These 30 Units of Assessment are available in Pure as a classification scheme, which makes it easy for administrators to manage them, change them as they evolve, limit them to the ones actually needed locally, etc. Units of Assessment are one of six key REF concepts in Pure. The others are described in the table below:

Concept	Description
Assessment Organisation	A virtual organisation in Pure, which matches one Unit of Assessment as defined by HEFCE. An Assessment Organisation called “10 - Physics” for example, could represent output from researchers from different departments of physics at the university.
Impact Statement	An Impact Statement contains a narrative statement about the impact of the research activities that are being submitted. An unlimited number of documents can be attached (binary and text) in support of the narrative.
Impacts	An Impact is the individual researcher’s account of specific impact as a result of specific research activities. Relations can be made between the Impact itself and other Impacts, Research outputs, and Activities and Projects.
Assessment Person	An Assessment Person contains information about one researcher for the REF return. It is related to that researcher in Pure. Only one relation with one researcher is possible.
Assessment Environment	Assessment Environments are related to Assessment Organisations in order to describe the research environment in that assessment area as required for REF.

REF2013 concept per HEFCE's 2nd consultation as implemented in Pure

These concepts have been carefully incorporated into Pure; both at datamodel level, in terms of supporting functionality, regarding reporting capabilities, and in Pures exhibition interfaces (Web-Service API, OAI).

REF assessment roles

A number of tasks must be carried out in Pure in order for an organisation to be ready for data submission by the REF census date. These tasks are carried out by three roles:

Role	Description
Personal User	Personal Users (i.e. researchers) have two duties in relation with REF: They must nominate their REF output candidates, and they must add their REF Impacts.
Assessment Editor	An Assessment Editor is an Organisational role with responsibility for the REF return for one organisation at the university: Typically for a school/faculty or a larger institute.
Assessment Administrator	An Assessment Administrator is a global role in Pure with responsibility for the REF return for the entire university. One or more persons can be Assessment Administrators.

REF-specific user-roles in Pure per HEFCE's 2nd consultation

REF processes

Researchers will nominate their REF candidates among all their research outputs. It is done by simply adding a check mark to the outputs in question. A commentary can be added for each candidate output. Researchers will also add their Impacts; short statements as described in the table above, which can be selected by Assessment Editors for the necessary Impact Statements to be submitted for each Unit of Assessment.
Assessment Editors will set up an Assessment Organisation for the Unit of Assessment whereto they wish to submit. Assessment Editors will also administrate and monitor incoming REF candidate outputs from the researchers and decide whether they are rejected or approved for REF. To that, Assessment Editors will also add the necessary Impact statements and Assessment Environments to the Assessment Organisation.
Assessment Administrators will examine the completed Assessment Organisations when they are ready from the Assessment Editors. They might return one or more of them to the Editors for improvements while adding their suggestions or other comments, but ultimately the Assessment Administrators will approve the Assessment Organisations to be returned for each of the Units of Assessment, and the REF return will be ready.

Tools

Assessment Administrators have tools at their disposal for these examinations and decisions. Pures Units of Assessment report offers a view of what would be returned for each Units of Assessment order by Assessment Organisations. Also, Assessment Organisations can be compared in reports that include detailed table-views of output types, impacts, environments, and persons per Assessment Organisation, and reports can show both the gross contribution to the total return by individual physical organisations (schools, institutes, departments) and the contribution normalised by number of employees or total funding.

Workflows in REF

Each REF content type can be subject to a workflow. Using workflows with REF content is particularly relevant with Impacts, Impact Statements, and Assessment Environments, because these are complex pieces of content with much information on them. Workflows can be used to collaboratively improve or enrich pieces of content to be in the REF return, to validate submissions or parts thereof, and to announce when content is ready for submission. They are also helpful in case of last minute changes; if personnel were to leave shortly before the census date, for example. Some examples are available in the table below:

Example	Description
1	A Researcher can tentatively send a near-completed Impact to an Assessment Editor for review and comments.
2	An Assessment Editor can return an Impact to the originating Researcher suggesting additional argumentation or strengthened evidence, for example.
3	An Assessment Editor can tentatively submit the near-completed Assessment Organisation to an Assessment Administrator for review and comments.
4	An Assessment Editor can submit the completed Assessment Organisation to the Assessment Administrator for approval.

REF workflow user stories

An important benefit from using workflows on REF content is, that important decisions about REF submission can be reviewed by more persons in addition to the one person making the initial decision.

REF confidentiality

All relevant parts of the entire REF production flow are kept confidential as appropriate.

Assessment Editors can write internal notes for each researcher and output candidate, and not this nor any of the other internal deliberations leading up to the REF return will be available to the researchers themselves or any other users in Pure apart from Assessment Editors and Assessment Administrators. For obvious reasons, such discretion is essential in a CRIS system dealing with REF content, and the architecture of Pure as well as the implementation of the REF concepts mentioned above has been designed specifically to ensure this discretion.

Returning to the REF

As per May 2010, we are still only at HEFCE's 2nd consultation. One among several things yet not clarified is the format and technology of the physical return itself. It is not known whether printed reports or data in a specific format will be required. Regardless of what interface and data format HEFCE will prefer, it will be supported in Pure as standard, if that is not already the case.

More information about this subject is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

REF roadmap

The development of basic REF-support in Pure is finished. The resulting datamodel-extensions and functionality have been tested, it has been approved by multiple UK HEIs, and it has been released. In its current standing, Pure is fully able to support UK HEIs in replying to the REF. However, additional REF-related functionality has been scheduled for development in 2010. Assessment Editors' tasks will be automated to a further extend, main-screens for Assessment Editors and Administrators will be improved to make it easier to look over and contemplate results at preliminary stages, and the selection of REF-specific reports available to Editors and Administrators will be extended.

More information about this subject is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Repository functionality

Basic repository functionality

Pure supports depositing and maintaining publication metadata and full-text files in 3rd party repository systems based on a configurable set of rules. The basic functionality is the same for all repository systems, but the individual feature sets vary according to the difference in the individual systems. Pure does not communicate with the repository by means of its Integration Platform, but by means of so-called repository connectors. A connector is an integrated part of Pure with specific functionality for the repository systems it facilitates integration with. A number of different connectors are available for different repository systems:

Repository	Integration method	Status
DSpace	Pure connector	Available
FEDORA	Pure connector	In development
E-prints	Pure connector	Available
Equella	Pure connector	Available

Repository systems to which Pure integrates directly

The short history of CRIS systems makes the best practise description for integration between CRISs and repository systems both short and rare. That is also the reason why much of Pures repository functionality is developed in collaboration with repository managers at the different installation sites - and the reason why we are happy to listen to further suggestions. The currently available standard functionality in Pure for supporting integrations with repositories is summarised in the table below:

Functionality	Description
Deposit	Deposit a publication to one or more repositories or to different collections within the same repository.
Control deposition	Control deposition based on a expressive configuration system with an extensible filter architecture (see table below).
Support of license agreements	Support for acceptance of license agreements by end users through Pure: Licenses are presented for acceptance in Pure when a user deposits a file.
Asynchronous deposition	Asynchronous deposition of files in repository systems: The user will not have to wait for a publication to be deposited in the repository after upload but can continue working while Pure silently deposits the publication.

Repository functionality

Deposition filters

Currently, publication deposition can be configured using the following filters:

Filter	Description
Classifications	Publications classified as being about science goes into one collection, while economic publications goes into another.
Embargo date	Files/publications are only transferred to DSpace when an embargo date is passed.
Limited visibility	Publications uploaded to PURE can be marked as having limited visibility (there are several degrees of visibility available).
Type filter	Articles in one collection, books in another.
Organisation filter	Distribute publications to collections based on organisational ownership.
Workflow filter	Control the deposit of publications according to the current workflow stage in PURE.

Filtering options

Please note, that the filtering model is easily extended to accommodate specific customer requirements. Also please note, that the availability of these features depends on the available functionality in the repository system - not all features will be available with all repository systems.

Portal functionality

PurePortal

PurePortal is a website for automatic exhibition of content from Pure. It requires no maintenance or management from the institution. Further, it can be deployed instantly. PurePortal facilitates public access to whatever content in Pure has been marked for public availability. Typically that would be researcher profiles, outputs, projects, events, collaborations, etc. Such access is highly relevant for stakeholders like the press, private sector businesses, undergraduates, and other interested parties. PurePortal can also make full-text available (see Full-text and Repository functionality). It can do that itself or by pointing to files on a Repository system.
Also, PurePortal will make content available for organic Google and similar search engines, and it will make content available for Google Scholar. This aspect of PurePortal is particularly relevant for the researchers, because high visibility on search engines shortly after a publication's publishing date leads to an increased number of citations. The table below shows examples of content in Pure that can be exhibited online on PurePortal:

Content type	Comment
Research output	Bibliographic metadata can be available online, as can full-text. PurePortal can make the full-text available directly or point to a repository. Publications and all other types of output will link to Researchers, Projects, Events, Organisations, and External Persons and Organisations.
Activities	Researchers’ activities can be online. Activities will often be as relevant to the press or to businesses as publications. Also, researchers are usually eager to have full profiles online including activities. Activities will link to Outputs, Researchers, Projects, Organisations, and External Organisations and Persons.
Projects	Project can be made available on PurePortal. All data can be shown, or selected content can be withheld - funding information, for example, or other financial information such as actual spending. Projects will link to Researchers, Organisations, External parties, and Activities.
Events	The institution’s event can be on PurePortal. Events will link to Researchers, and to the Projects under which they sort; if any.
Researchers	Researchers (“Persons”) can be shown on PurePortal. The record can be shown in whole or in part. Researchers will link to outputs, Activities, Projects, Events, Organisations, and External Organisations and Persons.
Organisations	Organisations can be shown on PurePortal, and as with other content types that can be in whole or in part. Guests will be able to see all of an organisation’s details, including lists of the organisation’s Researchers, Publications and other Outputs, Events, Press, etc. Each item on each of these lists (for example a researcher on the list of staff member) will be an active link - in this example to the researcher’s profile page. Organisations will link to Outputs, Activities, Projects, Events, Researchers, as well as External Organisations and Persons.
External organisations	External Organisations will be displayed, and they link will link to Outputs, Projects, Researchers, Organisations, and External Persons.
External Persons	External Persons will be displayed, and they link will link to Outputs, Projects, Researchers, Organisations, and External Organisations.
Subject keywords	If subject keywords have been added to content in Pure, the full list of subject keywords can be browsed by guests on PurePortal. Subject keywords can be hierarchical. If they are, the full list of subject keywords will also be hierarchical on PurePortal; e.g. “Technical Sciences” > “Computer Science” > “Application Architecture”. Guests can browser a pool of subject keywords like that, and when clicking “Application Architecture” as in the example above, the guest will see a list of all content in Pure under that keyword: Not just Researchers within that field, but also Organisations (e.g. “Department of Application Architecture”), Outputs, Projects, Events, etc. This ability to quickly browse to the university’s entire pool of Researcher Profiles, Departments, Outputs, Projects, etc. is a very powerful feature in Pure and PurePortal. Please also see “Classifications”.

Content types typically exhibited on PurePortal

Further, a PurePortal can be managed by administrators. They can set the desired URL for the portal and they can turn the portal on or off. This is done from within the Administrators user-interface. Similarly, content types can be included or excluded. It is possible to exclude Projects, for example. When excluding a specific type of content, links to that type will not be present on other types of content.

Standard PurePortal and Advanced PurePortal

PurePortal is available in two versions: Standard PurePortal and Advanced PurePortal. A Standard PurePortal comes free with each Pure license. It can easily be replaced by an Advanced PurePortal, which can be purchased by individual quote depending on the requirements. All features described earlier in this section are available in Basic PurePortal, and in addition to those, Advanced PurePortal includes the following features:

Feature	Description
Custom design	A custom design according to the institution’s own design manual or existing websites - everything can be customised, including stylesheets, colours, proportions, and design graphics.
Dynamic RSS feeds	Guests can subscribe to an RSS-feed for any search they make or to any specific Person, Organisation, Project, etc. This is a very useful tool for guests to keep up-to-date with a specific researcher’s work, for example, and therefore also a useful tool for the university’s efforts to disseminate research results and profiles.
Relation diagrams	Diagrams can be used to illustrate relations between things: Relations between a Person and other persons, for example, or relations between Persons, Organisation, Projects, etc. These are also called “Floating diagrams” because of their appearance. Any object in such a diagram is click-sensitive: Double-clicking it will take the guest to the details for the clicked object. Also, these diagrams can be altered by the guest: Another person can be dragged to the centre, for example, in to show this person’s relations instead.
Export options	Search results can be exported. Exports can be as XML or to PDF-, RTF- and CSV-file. When exporting publications, a reference format can also be set (HARVARD, Vancouver, MLA, APA, and others).
Dynamic graphs	Graphs like pie charts, bar charts, or line charts can be shown on PurePortal based on actual data in Pure. That means that the graph will be rendered per session for the individual guest on PurePortal. It can be used to show real-time status of any numerical data-set in Pure - a graph showing the number of peer-reviewed publications versus non-reviewed, for example, which is updated in real-time according to submissions in Pure.
Log-in by role	Advanced PurePortal can allow users in Pure to login to the Portal with their Pure-user credentials. Such identified users to can access content that they would have access to in Pure, but which is not accessible on the portal for outside guests. This is also referred to at the intranet-functionality of PurePortal.
Student theses	If the Student Theses module is installed, PurePortal can have functionality for submission of student theses in Pure via PurePortal. Students can identify themselves manually or be authenticated by an integration to the student administration system. They can add the required meta-data about the thesis, and attach full-text. All data submitted this way will go directly to Pure. Please also see Student Theses.

The additional features of advanced PurePortal

Advanced PurePortal is based on an extensive technical framework, which was made for customisation. That means that any Advanced PurePortal can be customised to meet local requirements for different graphical design and additional functionality.

More information about this subject is available in the Pure4 white-paper.

Examples from Advanced PurePortal

System	Type	Country	Standardised
Agresso	Finance	UK	Yes
SITS	Student Administration	UK	No
SAP	Finance	DE	No
Navision	Finance	DK	No
ScanPas	HR and authentication	DK	No
Kerberos	Authentication	UK, DK	Yes
Shibboleth	Authentication	UK, FI	Yes
Active Directory	Authentication	UK, DK, SE, FI	Yes
CAS	Authentication	DK, UK	Yes
Meltwater	Press feed	DK	Yes
InfoPaq	Press feed	DK	Yes
pFACT	Grants and awards	UK	No
ResourceLink	HR and authentication	UK	No

Type	Example
Simple validation of field value-types	Only numerical values in number-fields
Simple validation of field value-types	E-mail addresses must contain one @-sign and at least one .-sign.
Validation of field-utilisation by content type	Title is required on a publication
Validation of field-utilisation by content type	There must be at least one Author on a publication
Conditional field-validation	If a publication is classified “External”, at least one author must be internal
Conditional field-validation	classification on a classification scheme must be formatted as a content-type URI if the classification scheme is of the type “Content type classification scheme”

Country	User-interface	Content
Germany	DE, UK	Primary/Secondary: German/English
United Kingdom	UK	Primary: English
Belgium	NL, UK, DE	Primary/Secondary: Dutch/English
Sweden	SE, UK	Primary/Secondary: Swedish/English
Finland	FI, UK, SE	Primary/Secondary/Tertiary: Finnish/Swedish/English
Denmark	DK, EN	Primary/Secondary: Danish/English

Functionality

Site map

Contact

About Atira