SPEAKERS

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.

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.

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.

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).