July 30, 2018, by Katherine Beers

A Librarian perspective on how to manage the change from eprints to RIS

Here in the Libraries Research Support Team we’ve been gearing up for a big change, the expansion of RIS (Research Information Systems) to manage outputs and the move away from ePrints to a new institutional repository. I say a big change, because for those of us administering it that’s what it feels like, but what kind of change will it be for researchers? 

If you are a researcher with external funding bids already being managed through RIS, then the first time you come across this development will likely be when you log into the system to manage these. Suddenly, there will be more tabs in the system. The new tabs are ‘People’ and ‘Outputs’. It’s worth checking out the People tab and making sure that your ORCID iD is correct and that any names that you publish under are recorded in the system. The outputs tab will have all your publications from e-Prints in it already (the process of moving them may take a few days though) and the tab gives new functionality for you to manage your publications, so it’s worth having a bit of an explore. 

If you are a researcher in a field which is less involved with external funding bids, then you may not yet be familiar with RIS. Now is the time to get familiar, rather than waiting until you’re coming up to a ‘3 months from acceptance’ deposit deadline. The first time you log into RIS you’ll need to go through the moodle site and get your account approved. This isn’t instantaneous so it’s worth getting it done ahead of time.  

When you’re ready to deposit a research output (journal article, book chapter etc.), you should head over to the outputs tab and click the ‘add new output’ button. Lots of resources have been put together to help you deposit your output, they can be found on the Research Support webpages. Throughout August the Research Support Team will be holding training sessions to help you with the deposit process, these will also give you time to practice depositing or to ask questions of the team. It’s also worth remembering that the Mediated Deposit Service will still be available if you are struggling to deposit your article yourself. 

We hope that the transition to RIS will be an exciting development in ensuring that all stages of the research cycle are easy to manage and in giving researchers full control of this process. If you run across any difficulties please email openaccess@nottingham.ac.uk. 

This blog post was written by Beth Montague-Hellen our Senior Research Librarian for Engineering

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