PROGRAM

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• Clarke Iakovakis, Oklahoma State University
• Alexandra Winzeler, Business Development Manager, Digital Science

Join us as we kick off EFS 2025, with an overview of the program, conference planning team, and much more.

• Steve Fening, Associate Vice President for Research, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Managing Director, Case-Coulter Program, Case Western Reserve University
• David Scherer, Customer Consultant for Pure and RDMS, Elsevier

CWRU is a founding university partner of the Ohio Innovation Exchange (OIEx) and is actively renewing its efforts to drive collaboration, discovery, and innovation. We will share a few case studies/examples of how industry partnerships form, evolve, and support the research mission of our university while highlighting how research information management systems support these efforts.

Dr. Stephen Fening is an Associate Vice President for Research at Case Western Reserve University, a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and the Managing Director of the Case-Coulter Translational Research Partnership.

• Alexandra Winzeler, Business Development Manager, Digital Science

Sponsored By: Symplectic

• Emily K Hart, Science Librarian, Research Impact Lead, Syracuse University
• Alexandra Winzeler, Business Development Manager, Digital Science
• Connie Stovall, Director for Research Impact & Intelligence, Virginia Tech
• Andrea Malone, Research Visibility and impact Coordinator, University of Houston

The phrase “research impact” can have many different meanings and interpretations, depending on the audience, setting, or discipline you're interacting with. From societal impact to citations and research metrics, panelists will dive into the research impact universe and share use cases and perspectives from a variety of institutions and disciplines. Panelists will address questions like, how might research impact be viewed differently from the perspective of a research development professional, a faculty member going up for promotion, a funding agency, or a technical entrepreneur? How does impact translate across industries, disciplines, or different types of research and creative works?

When we gain a broader understanding of how different members of the research and creative communities interpret, define, and report on “research impact”, we can begin to better leverage and design systems that support the full breadth of our communities' needs. Panelists will examine how RIMS are currently playing a role in tracking, reporting on, and communicating about impact throughout the research, scholarly, and creative lifecycles, and where they hope RIMS can take us in the future.

• Deron Morgan, Clarivate

Sponsored By: Clarivate

This session will provide a quick overview of Esploro, highlighting recent enhancements that improve research information management, researcher visibility, and reporting. Real-world customer use cases will illustrate how institutions are applying Esploro to streamline workflows and showcase research impact.

• Jason Glenn, Director, Research Information Managment Services, Carnegie Mellon University
• Dom Jebbia, Library AI Infrastructure Resident and Project Manager, Carnegie Mellon University
• Ann Beynon, Senior Manager, Customer Success, Clarivate

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries is currently developing an innovative suite of AI-powered tools addressing two critical challenges in research information management: the adoption barrier for public researcher profiles and the balanced distribution of committee service responsibilities among faculty. Our prototype toolset leverages natural language processing and machine learning techniques to extract committee service data from faculty CVs and other unstructured sources, import this information into the Elements/Scholars@CMU platform, and analyze the data to provide recommendations for achieving greater balance in committee service workload. This presentation will share our in-progress development approach, initial prototype functionality, methodological considerations, and preliminary findings. We'll demonstrate how libraries can position themselves as essential curators of institutional data while advancing fairness initiatives through innovative applications of AI in research information management.

• MacKinley Darlington, Interim Director, AU Press, Athabasca University Press
• Sean Newell, Senior Director, Elsevier
• Paul Daniels, Director, Research Performance, Reporting, and Infrastructure, Victoria University
• Tina Moir, Senior Director, Elsevier

Athabasca University is pioneering an innovative approach to address the growing demand for universities to demonstrate the societal impact of their research. As the need to showcase tangible outcomes becomes increasingly critical, measuring and articulating impact remains a complex challenge.

Our session will offer an exploration of our journey with Elsevier's Pure Impact AI tool. With the support of Elsevier's Pure Impact AI, Athabasca is leading the way in developing a holistic, nuanced, and multifaceted solution to capture both qualitative and quantitative metrics of research impact. Attendees will learn how this advanced AI tool enables academic leaders and research administrators to efficiently find, measure, and communicate the societal impact of their research. We will share insights from our pilot testing phase. Through this partnership, Athabasca is setting a new standard for research impact communication, with Elsevier's technology playing a vital supporting role.

Athabasca University is Canada's open university, renowned for its commitment to digital innovation. Our research enterprise is both community-focused and impact-driven, challenging conventional methods by breaking down barriers to knowledge creation and dissemination. Pure, a robust research information management system that centralizes a diverse range of research data types, is focal to our efforts and is being used to enhance transparency and foster collaborative innovation across disciplines. And the Pure Impact AI tools discussed in this presentation features in this work.

• Bryan Cooper, Chair, VIVO Leadership Group, Vivo Connect
• Bruce Herbert, Professor, Texas A&M University

Sponsored By: Vivo Connect

• Andii Johnson, Argo Scholar Commons & Digital Systems Manager, University of West Florida
• Cindy Gruwell, Reference Librarian, University of West Florida
• Deron Morgan, Clarivate

At the University of West Florida Libraries, our journey with Esploro has been one of strategic growth—planting the seeds of collaboration, nurturing engagement, and looking forward to harvesting the benefits of a well-integrated research information management system. We recognized that the success of the Argo Scholar Commons required a long-term vision, one that focuses on gradual buy-in from stakeholders across different levels of the university. By offering meaningful solutions—such as multi-faceted researcher profiles, low-maintenance department pages, and automated smart harvesting—our aim is to align the work of the ASC with the research needs of the university.

Our presentation will explore how we are leveraging Esploro's functionality to engage institutional stakeholders and foster organic policy development and institutional trust. When the UWF Libraries adopted Esploro for our institutional repository, we were looking for a system that would help us develop a sustainable and functional research ecosystem that could be integrated into the fabric of the UWF community.

We will offer insights into our successes, challenges, and ongoing strategies for maintaining engagement with Esploro. We will also share key lessons learned, including the importance of adaptability, the role of visual and functional trust, and the necessity of continuous outreach. Attendees will leave with practical takeaways on how to cultivate long-term success with their own expert finder systems, ensuring that they become deeply woven into the institutional fabric rather than becoming siloed, underutilized tools.

• Besiki Stvilia, Professor, Florida State University, School of Information

• Tina Moir, Senior Director, Elsevier
• Besiki Stvilia, Professor, Florida State University, School of Information

• Ann Beynon, Senior Manager, Customer Success, Clarivate
• Jason Reece, Associate professor of city and regional planning and Vice Provost for Urban Research & Community Engagement in the Office of Academic Affairs, Ohio State University
• Michael Oakes, Senior Vice President for Research and Technology Management, Case Western Reserve University
• Bruce Herbert, Professor, Texas A&M University

US polls show that the the public is increasingly skeptical of the value and cost of higher education. In a recent Gallup poll, only 36% of adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot of” confidence in higher education. This has declined steadily from 57% in 2015. Issues around affordability and value, trust and confidence, and a perceived disconnect with the average American are fueling this perception. It is more important than ever for academia to communicate effectively about the value of universities to the public. Research is one aspect of this. Research Information Management Systems (RIMS) are an important tool that can help communicate a university's research and scholarly activities to its local, regional, national, and international community. We will hear from experts on communicating about research to the public, as well as universities who have used their RIM to enhance community engagement.

• Randall Love, Elsevier
• Sean Newell, Senior Director, Elsevier
• David Scherer, Customer Consultant for Pure and RDMS, Elsevier

Sponsored By: Elsevier

At a time of dramatic change, many universities, medical facilities, and government labs are searching for ways to meet the goals and objectives placed upon them. Being able to demonstrate to funders, politicians, and the public the direct impact research has on the world in which we live becomes a critical necessity. This session will provide a quick overview of how Expert Finders Systems can help meet the specific goals as provided to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and share an overview of how one funder, NSF TIP, has partnered with Elsevier to help meet these challenges.

• Mark Zulauf, Researcher Information Systems Coordinator, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Elizabeth Schwartz, Faculty Profiles Support Manager, Washington University in St. Louis
• David Scherer, Customer Consultant for Pure and RDMS, Elsevier

At the heart of a valued research information management (RIM) service is a well-curated set of easily accessible and trustworthy data that describe an institution's research activity. The cultivation of those data into beneficial use cases requires ongoing collaboration among myriad stakeholders from within the research development community (librarians, faculty administrators, communications specialists, technology licensing agents, facility and equipment managers, IT personnel, etc.).

The presenters will discuss several collaborations, including creating a workflow to harvest local patents data and supplement with details from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, leveraging Crossref publication data to support communications professionals in efforts to pitch research-related stories to major news media, and porting legacy faculty activity data into a single, centralized campus repository in order to retire aging unit websites and databases.

• Besiki Stvilia, Professor, Florida State University, School of Information

• Rachel Miles, Assistant Director for Research Impact and Information Management, Virginia Tech
• Emily Mazure, Research Impact Librarian, Virginia Tech
• Mengyu Yin, Research Intelligence Data Scientist, Virginia Tech
• Benjamin Greenawald, Assistant Director, Faculty Data Science, Virginia Tech
• Alexandra Winzeler, Business Development Manager, Digital Science

At the heart of a valued research information management (RIM) service is a well-curated set of easily accessible and trustworthy data that describe an institution's research activity. The cultivation of those data into beneficial use cases requires ongoing collaboration among myriad stakeholders from within the research development community (librarians, faculty administrators, communications specialists, technology licensing agents, facility and equipment managers, IT personnel, etc.).

This presentation will explore the social interoperability involved in nurturing the library-managed RIM services at two major midwestern research universities—from the partnerships involved in unifying previously siloed sources of data to the use cases supported in each campus' quest to understand, report on, and showcase its research accomplishments.

The presenters will discuss several collaborations, including creating a workflow to harvest local patents data and supplement with details from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, leveraging Crossref publication data to support communications professionals in efforts to pitch research-related stories to major news media, and porting legacy faculty activity data into a single, centralized campus repository in order to retire aging unit websites and databases.

• Renaine Julian, Head, Academic Liaison Programs & Services, Florida State University Libraries
• Stephanie Faulkner, SVP Product & Analysis, Academic Analytics

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are central to the advancement of open science goals and FAIR data principles. PIDs provide a mechanism to name, distribute, link to, and track data sets, people, institutions, facilities, instruments, and other research objects over time. Persistent identification of research facilities and instruments has the potential to increase the transparency and replicability of scientific research, and to enable easier tracking of the uses and impacts of these facilities and instruments. This presentation will outline insights and lessons learned from an NSF-funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) project centered on developing and communicating community-based recommendations for assigning PIDs to research facilities and instruments.

Presenters will share findings from this three-year NSF project including the results from virtual and in-person stakeholder workshops, reasons why there is a need for national and international-level PID adoption strategies for research facilities and instruments, and approaches individuals can take to advance this work at their own institutions. This presentation aims to inform the Expert Finder and research information systems community on how the project's recommendations can be implemented in these systems and leverage interdisciplinary expertise to advance open and networked science. In particular, use of PIDs for research facilities and instruments in expert finder and research information systems has the potential to promote enhanced discovery and impact tracking of these facilities and instruments, which were key use cases identified by participants from a number of stakeholder groups throughout the project activities. The presentation seeks to connect project recommendations based on these use cases to existing and future implementations of PIDs for research facilities and instruments in the expert finder and research information systems community.

• Scott Woods, Founder & CEO, West Arete
• Shannyn Lee, Head of Outreach, West Arete
• Natalie Simonson, Head of Solutions, West Arete

Sponsored By: West Arete

• Besiki Stvilia, Professor, Florida State University, School of Information

After a decade of consistent traffic growth driven by search engine optimization (SEO), traffic to the UCSF Profiles expert finder system and others in our network has shown declines for the first time ever, back toward pre-pandemic levels. While this may reflect reduced interest in UCSF COVID-19 researchers, we're curious about another possibility: are search engines and AI bots increasingly delivering our content without sending users our way?

Google, Bing, and other search engines often display knowledge panels or AI-generated summaries directly at the top of the results page, especially for higher-profile researchers. The links to our site are still there, but hidden under the search engine's summary. For years we worked to be the #1 search result, but is the resulting traffic waning in an increasingly no-click world? Are users still benefiting from our work, just invisibly? And how should expert finder systems measure success in this new environment?

We're also exploring another angle: our own performance. Poorly behaved bots, some associated with newer AI companies, may be placing increasing load on our systems. Sites like Wikipedia have reported substantial strain from new bots. Expert finder systems, featuring rich structured public data, may be similarly vulnerable, affecting both performance and the quality of our analytics.

In this session, we'll share what we've seen, and make space for candid conversations:

• Are popular profiles losing traffic while lesser-known ones hold steady?
• Is our content particularly ripe bot fodder because it is slow moving and reflected in other sources like PubMed and NIH RePORTER?
• How much of our traffic is real users vs. bots?
• How can we measure impact beyond web clicks? If people see our content, but not on our site, is that a win or a loss?
• Should the expert finder community rethink exposure strategies in the AI era?

We don't have the answers, but together, we can start making sense of this new world.

• Eric Meeks, CTO, Clinical & Translational Science Institute, UCSF
• Tina Moir, Senior Director, Elsevier

• Shannyn Lee, Head of Outreach, West Arete
• Natalie Simonson, Head of Solutions, West Arete

By the time this session begins, you'll have heard dozens of implementation stories from many universities. This fast-paced, guided workshop, helps you translate those ideas into your university's context. Using a simple one-page, four-quadrant framework, you will:

1. Capture the stories and practices that resonated
2. Name what's unique about your institution—constraints, culture, and opportunities
3. Generate adapted approaches that fit your reality
4. Identify the people and first conversations that will move things forward next week.

You'll leave with a concise, reusable template you can bring into Thursday's sessions and back to campus—an actionable snapshot of priorities, next steps, and collaborators. This is not a lecture; it's a short, high-energy facilitation focused on you.

What to bring: a sheet of paper and a marker. The old school method.

Facilitated by: West Arete

• Besiki Stvilia, Professor, Florida State University, School of Information

• Clarke Iakovakis, Oklahoma State University
• Ann Beynon, Senior Manager, Customer Success, Clarivate

• Ann Beynon, Senior Manager, Customer Success, Clarivate
• Bruce Herbert, Professor, Texas A&M University
• Kevin Gamache, Chief Research Security Officer and Director, NSF SECURE Analytics, Texas A&M

Research security compliance is an essential and challenging process for university research administrators. Many countries, including the United States, have instituted research security policies tied to government research grants, with the goal of safeguarding research from undue foreign influence. In this panel, we will discuss how Research Information Management Systems (RIMS) can support these efforts. Any research security work is only as good as the data behind it. RIMS offer one important source of research security data about faculty affiliations (current and prior), funding sources, and collaborators. We will hear how universities are using their RIM to support this use case.

• Brandalynn White, Business Analyst, Indiana University
• Akash Shah, Assistant Vice President for Academic Systems, Indiana University
• Lora Fox, AVP, Enterprise Systems, Indiana University
• Willie Miller, Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Indiana University
• Logan Paul, Faculty, Indiana University
• Alexandra Winzeler, Business Development Manager, Digital Science

Indiana University (IU) has embarked on a significant transition from the DMAI (Watermark: Digital Measures Activity Insight) system to Symplectic Elements for faculty activity reporting. Prompted by faculty feedback, IU selected Elements through a competitive RFP process in spring 2024 and successfully launched the new system across all nine campuses by the end of the year.

The implementation team reimagined faculty activity reporting from the ground up—migrating years of historical data, integrating with multiple platforms across IU's technological ecosystem, and providing training to thousands of faculty members. This ambitious effort was deeply collaborative, involving faculty and administrative stakeholders at every stage. The focus remained on enhancing user experience, streamlining workflows, and ensuring the seamless and accurate transfer of existing data.

In this panel, key decision-makers and stakeholders will share insights, challenges, and innovative strategies from this transformative journey.

• Jenny Hulsen, Sr. Product Manager, Academic Analytics
• Jami Thompson, Implementation Success Manager, Academic Analytics
• Stephanie Faulkner, SVP Product & Analysis, Academic Analytics

We all know that faculty generally dislike the burden of keeping multiple profiles up-to-date. How can we get faculty to see that FIS/RIM/CRIS systems are tools that can not only help them tell their story, but also helps align their professional goals with institutional requirements. In this session we'll discuss the importance of change management, as well as other ways to get faculty buy-in.

• Stephanie Faulkner, SVP Product & Analysis, Academic Analytics

Sponsored By: Academic Analytics

Academic Analytics provides valuable resources and tools that support universities in their efforts to achieve research excellence. Through its specialized solutions, institutions can better understand their research landscape, identify areas for growth, and implement strategies that drive academic distinction.

• Jackson Anderson, Director of Product Management, Digital Science
• Timothy Cain, Associate professor, Ohio University | Ohio Dept of Higher Education
• Alexandra Winzeler, Business Development Manager, Digital Science

Universities increasingly recognize the value of interdisciplinary collaboration as a powerful way to tackle complex challenges. However, establishing effective partnerships across institutions, industry, and government is often difficult due to siloed organizational structures and language barriers between sectors.

The Ohio Innovation Exchange (OIEx) provides a centralized web portal enabling users to discover expertise, research opportunities, intellectual property, and specialized equipment and services across Ohio's higher education landscape. Built upon Symplectic Elements, OIEx directly facilitates connections between academia and industry partners to foster collaboration and innovation.

Simply bringing potential collaborators together is often not enough: effective partnerships depend on clear communication and shared understanding. Industry practitioners often describe emerging technologies in terms unfamiliar to academics, who instead reference more traditional disciplinary frameworks. This linguistic disconnect creates challenges when industry users seek academic expertise.

To address these dual challenges of language barriers and researcher time constraints, OIEx is partnering with Digital Science to explore the potential of two complementary AI-powered approaches:

1. Generative AI-driven search: Integrating generative AI models within researcher profile searches to translate and interpret user queries from industry partners, allowing for intuitive discovery of academic expertise despite differing vocabularies and linguistic approaches.
2. Automated tagging of researcher profiles: An exploratory prototype is underway to automatically enhance academic researcher profiles with industry-specific keywords and standardized industry classifications, such as the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).

• Clarke Iakovakis, Oklahoma State University
• Emily K Hart, Science Librarian, Research Impact Lead, Syracuse University
• Ethel Mejia, Senior Data Analyst, Texas A&M University
• Angela Clark, Director, Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science Library, University of Miami
• Rebecca Bryant, Senior Program Officer, OCLC
• Tina Moir, Senior Director, Elsevier

As Research Information Management Systems (RIMS) become more central to institutional research infrastructure, library professionals are increasingly recognized as essential partners in their implementation and ongoing management. This panel will explore the metadata expertise and service orientation that library workers bring to RIMS, especially in managing the complexities of research output metadata across disciplines and platforms.

Panelists will discuss how their work contributes to RIM system stewardship, from developing metadata crosswalks and interpreting publication data to integrating open access resources and institutional repositories. Specific challenges, such as copyright compliance, data deduplication, and reconciling repository content with RIMS, will be explored, along with lessons learned from outreach, cleanup, and system configuration efforts.

We will also address how library values—privacy, transparency, responsible metrics, and user-centered support—inform how library staff design services and workflows. This includes support strategies like documentation, workshops, one-on-one consultations, and acting as a liaison with both faculty as well as offices across campus.

Finally, the panel will spotlight the unique challenges of representing creative and performing arts outputs in RIMS, where standard data structures often fall short. Presenters will discuss the hands-on work of structuring data for arts activities, the high-touch support this requires, and the importance of incentivizing and recognizing faculty participation in the system.

Attendees will come away with practical insights into the evolving role of library workers in RIM system management, and the competencies that position them as both technical experts and trusted campus partners.

• Anirvan Chatterjee, Director, Data Strategy, CTSI, University of California, San Francisco
• Deron Morgan, Clarivate

We've all put a lot of effort into building expert finder systems—but what else can we do with all that data? At the University of California, San Francisco, we took a fresh look at our UCSF Profiles data and asked a deceptively simple question: is this researcher doing basic science, or clinical/translational work? That question turned out to be more complicated—and more valuable—than we expected.

This talk will walk through how our team combined publication, grant, and other research metadata from UCSF Profiles to explore faculty research directions through a new lens. We tested a range of approaches, from rule-based methods to AI models, and worked closely with internal stakeholders to validate whether our classifications held up.

Along the way, we grappled with the fuzziness of research categories, struggled to resolve disagreements over what defines a researcher, developed strategies to build trust in algorithmic results, and figured out how to apply similar techniques to classify grants—not just people.

We thought the project was about labeling researchers, but it made us rethink how we use the data we already have to tell clearer stories about who's doing what at UCSF—and using those insights to support planning, reporting, recruitment, retention, and research development. If your institution has an expert finder system and you're looking for new ways to unlock its potential, this talk is for you.