Making the Most of What We Have Got: Enhancing the RADAR Repository to Support Research Planning

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how RADAR, the institutional repository (IR) at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), has been modified to house an Annual Research Planning (ARP) template. A case study on the implementation of this research planning tool will outline the role that a repository and its staff can play in supporting individuals, enhancing processes, and helping to reach strategic institutional goals in preparing for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF). The paper will also investigate how the extension of RADAR to incorporate Current Research Information System (CRIS) elements has led to increased user engagement and has successfully demonstrated a new use for the repository beyond its scholarly communication function.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional repository
• researchers
• roles
• scholarly communication

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank: Kelly Terrell and her colleagues at EPrints Services for their help and support in developing the Annual Research Plan in RADAR; Dr Robin Burgess for his work on RADAR at the Glasgow School of Art; and Duncan Chappell, Professor Ken Neil, and Alison Stevenson at the Glasgow School of Art for their advice on this article.

Notes

¹ CRIS systems have been developed to “assist the users in their recording, reporting, and decision-making concerning the research process, whether they are developing programmes, allocating funding, assessing projects, executing projects, generating results, assessing results or transferring technology” (de Castro et al., 2014, p. 40).

² Research power “is calculated by multiplying the institution's overall rounded GPA [grade point average] by the exact total number of full-time equivalent staff it submitted to the REF. This is an attempt to combine volume and quality to produce a ranking that gives a more accurate indication than GPA of the relative amount of quality-related research funding each institution is likely to receive.” https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/ref-2014-results-by-subject/2017594.article

³ The new REF open access policy states that to be eligible for the next REF, journal articles and papers published in conference proceedings with an ISSN must be deposited and made openly accessible in a repository such as RADAR, within 3 months of the date of acceptance. Further information can be found on their website: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/oa/

⁴ http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/

⁵ We elaborate further on this in our blog post “GSA authors: Have you seen your RADAR download stats this month?”: https://gsaradar.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/gsa-authors-have-you-seen-your-radar-download-stats-this-month/

⁶ IRUS-UK (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics UK) is a Jisc-funded national aggregation service, which provides COUNTER-compliant usage statistics for all content downloaded from participating U.K. institutional repositories (IRs): http://www.irus.mimas.ac.uk/