R&IS News

The University will soon be implementing new IT systems to replace EPrints, which underpins the Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) and Ideate, the University’s pre-award research grants & contracts management system.

The University will also be introducing a Current Research Information System (CRIS) which is a new capability for Warwick, drawing together multiple sources of research information into one place to serve a wide range of research needs.

Combined, the new solutions will offer enhanced support for pre & post-award grants and contracts management, research planning, fund/funder sourcing, impact capture, publication management and a range of other research information services.

The benefits

The new systems will, amongst other things, provide:

• Improved visibility of progress through the grant application process
• Reduced manual data entry and ‘rekeying’ through system integrations ensuring data consistency and a means to resolve data issues at source
• REF publication management and modelling capability
• A new discovery module enabling our researchers and their expertise to be much more visible and searchable to a global audience
• Faster population of researcher profile pages within the discovery module using a wide range of publication indices, while also enabling our researchers to customise their profile pages.

The approach

Colleagues from across the University – including academic departments, Research and Impact Services, the Library,Information & Digital Group, and Finance– have worked together to determine the requirements for the new solutions and select the optimal suppliers of the new systems.

Worktribe has been selected to provide pre & post-award research management, with Digital Science providing the new repository (Figshare) and CRIS (Symplectic Elements). Thank you to all those colleagues involved for their work and participation in the process.

Next steps

The IT systems that currently support parts of the research lifecycle will be phased out, beginning with Ideate (used for pre-award management) which will be phased out by the end of August 2025.

IDG, together with R&IS, the Library and Finance, will be providing more information and training for colleagues on the new systems, and we’ll share details as they become available.

Find out more on our dedicated webpages, or email the project team at RASproject@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window.