Dear colleagues,

At 5pm on Friday 1 November we will be turning on an important function of RIS, data harvesting. This function imports our publications and other outputs from external databases such as Scopus and CrossRef into RIS. We will be taking a conservative approach to introducing data harvesting because there are more then 100,000 outputs that could be brought into RIS from external databases, so we have decided to break down the import into manageable stages. Initially we will restrict the harvesting to dates after 2013 so that we cover the REF period only. We will also only add new data sources slowly – we have five potential sources – to limit the rate of change.

Over the next four months, assuming all goes well, we will turn on harvesting from Cross Ref (Friday 1 Nov), Scopus (Friday 8 Nov), ORCID (Friday 22 Nov), Web of Science and arXiv (TBC – subject to further checks).

Colleagues need to be familiar with actions that will arise from data harvesting. For most publications brought into RIS from an external database there will already be an author generated record in RIS submitted at or before publication acceptance. In this case staff in our libraries will reconcile the ‘old’ and ‘new’ records to create a final record with all of the information required for REF compliance.

If a publication is found in an external database with no corresponding record in RIS then the RIS system will alert all potential University of Nottingham authors and ask for the record to be confirmed. The alert will be via an email from Worktribe unless you have switched off email alerts in your RIS profile.

Ideally, the RIS system will be able to assign each publication to all Nottingham authors. However, author matching is imperfect if based on text alone. Therefore, it is very helpful if all academic staff can add their ORCID unique identifier to their RIS profile and ensure that this identifier is used whenever you submit a new publication. ORCID identifiers will be the most reliable way of linking authors to outputs.

If you require any assistance with your outputs or adding ORCID numbers then guidance is available on RIS or you can email openaccess@nottingham.ac.uk. If you would like further information about the RIS system itself or the data harvesting process then please email ris-enquiries@nottingham.ac.uk.

Kevin Shakesheff
PVC Faculty of Science