‘Showcase’ project

Excellent, prominent researchers, capable of communicating their passion to students and society, determine the success of the University of Groningen as a research institution. Researchers operate in an increasingly competitive environment, which places higher and higher demands not only on quality and performance, but also on transparency and cooperation (both national and international).

Improving the transparency and visibility of research results and achievements and simplifying reports are important elements in supporting researchers.

It is important that the research results of this University are clearly visible, not only to attract potential staff, students, partners, sponsors, journalists, research information brokers and evaluating bodies, but also because we value knowledge transfer and social relevance in general. The University therefore strives to present publications of University staff in an accessible way by providing a direct link to the full text – if available.

The PURE system that will be launched by the Showcase project offers great ways to showcase the successes of academic research on the internet. PURE also enables users to see how the departments, their researchers and all related publications are connected, and will also provide access to information such as awards won, popular publications, contributions to conferences, and so on and so forth.

The information in PURE will be automatically updated through a periodical feed with data from PeopleSoft and Planon, and also with online publication details from, primarily, Web of Science. All researchers will receive a digital staff page with professional content.

The project has a Sounding Board with representatives from all faculties on tactical and strategic levels of the research domain. In addition, there are five working groups responsible for the presentation of results.

The working groups are:

1. Showcase Functionality: responsible for the structured presentation of information on profile pages (MePa), integration with the University of Groningen website, etc.
2. Research Information Management: responsible for setting up and implementing new possibilities for analyzing and reporting aggregated information.
3. Architecture and Migration: responsible for providing the system with accurate content, for keeping the information up-to-date, and for migrating existing information to PURE (Metis and repositories).
4. Processes and Support: responsible for providing support to researchers and other users of the system, for the organization of the workflow, and for checking the data input. The library will play an important role here.
5. Communications: the goals of this project can only be achieved if all stakeholders are optimally informed and if there is sufficient support. The working group is going to tackle this with a communication plan.