Author: Sarah Faux

Join the new Viva Engage channel: Measuring Visibility and Impact

Join the new Viva Engage channel: Measuring Visibility and Impact

Scholarly Communications Management team has created a new Viva Engage community channel, Measuring Visibility and Impact to share insights and updates and invite discussion and collaboration on the various tools that imperial subscribes to. Tips and guidance on responsible use of metrics will also be shared.

Imperial subscribes to a number of powerful tools (e.g. Altmetric for tracking mentions of research publications on social media and news and Overton for monitoring citations on policy documents), but many staff and students are either unaware of these sources or unsure how to use them effectively. Through the Measuring Visibility and Impact channel, we aim to bridge this gap by advertising the tools, sharing updates about them, interesting case studies and organising training sessions to equip you to work with them.

The research analytics products allow you to:

  • track academic and societal impact of research publications, not only journal articles but other types of outputs such as reports, theses or preprints,
  • move away from journal-based metrics and h-index,
  • better communicate research results and increase visibility,
  • help you prepare job applications, narrative CVs, grant applications and REF submissions,
  • understand the latest research trends and key research areas in different disciplines,
  • monitor research performance of research groups, departments, faculties or institutions.

The community channel will support Imperial’s commitment to the responsible use of metrics by promoting best practice, fostering awareness, and keeping you updated about initiatives and opportunities. The channel will serve the ultimate objective of building a healthy research culture at Imperial by helping us break out of the dysfunctional culture of publish-or-perish.

Please join the Measuring Visibility and Impact community channel on Viva Engage and share this message with your contacts who might be interested.

International Family Network

Are you an international student with dependants ?   Our International Family Network is for all Imperial International Students who have their dependants with them in the UK.  We arrange fun trips and events for you and your family such as theatre trips , visits to London tourist destinations and also on campus events such as the traditional Easter Egg Hunt in the College Gardens  .  See our website for further details.

Join our mailing list here or email s.markey@imperial.ac.uk .

New Trusted Research Training e-learning module

All staff with research, and academic responsibilities are expected to complete a new Trusted Research e-learning module. We encourage PhD students to complete this module too.

Research security considerations are increasingly important for universities across the UK, which includes minimising risks to national security during international research collaborations. It is crucial to ensure that everyone undertaking research at Imperial are aware of what Research Security is, its role in academia and key considerations when collaborating with research and funding partners overseas.

This module introduces Research Security, providing learners with insight into core principles including legal compliance, contractual obligations, and protective measures.

Joining instructions: You can self-enrol onto the course through the Trusted Research Module website.

Further training focused on export controls specifically will be released soon. If you are interested in being enrolled onto this module, please see the Research Security Training website for more information.

Additionally, the new Research Security website provides guidance on various areas of Research Security including the Trusted Research agenda, key legislation, and signposts other relevant areas of the university’s online guidance.

Access the New York Times to discover quality journalism

Access the New York Times to discover quality journalism

We are pleased to announce that we have purchased a subscription to the New York Times.  The subscription provides access to all Imperial students and staff.

Don’t miss this opportunity to stay informed and up to date with the latest news from one of the world’s most respected news sources.

You can access both New York Times website and app content, including the International, Chinese, and Spanish editions of the newspaper.

First-time users are required to register with their Imperial email address. Further details on how to register can be found on the Imperial website.

Imperial staff and students have full access to Overton

Following the College-wide trial for Overton, Imperial has now subscribed to the product.

All staff and students have full access to Overton. If you are within Imperial’s IP range, you will be able to browse Overton and see policy documents without logging in. However, we encourage to create a personal account to use all Overton’s functionalities. Get in touch with Yusuf Ozkan (y.ozkan@imperial.ac.uk) to request the registration link.

We will arrange a walkthrough session with the Overton team and let you know once the date is confirmed. In the meantime, you can check out the following resources:

1) A short video introducting Overton

2) Getting Started  section on Overton’s Knowledge Base to help get users oriented to the platform

3) You can also sign up to Overton’s newsletter  which contains new features and other useful information for users.

Overton is a policy document database and helps find the impact of academic research outputs within policy documents. It facilitates searches for policy documents, guidelines, think tank publications, and working papers. The product collects data from nearly 200 countries in various languages. Overton also tracks the impact of research outputs on policy by identifying references, people, and organisations. It reveals where research articles are cited or mentioned in policy documents.

You can contact Yusuf Ozkan, Research Outputs Analyst (y.ozkan@imperial.ac.uk) for your questions.

Societal Engagement Reading Group

Are you interested in public engagement or outreach? You’re invited to join the Societal Engagement Reading Group as we discuss papers and articles exploring current thinking around public engagement, schools outreach and other related areas. Meeting regularly throughout the year (every 6 weeks), this reading group is open to all members of Imperial staff and doctoral students to have a friendly discussions about the chosen reading for the meeting and our work. Our next meeting is on Wednesday 07/02/2024.

Engagement or outreach practitioners and those who are keen to embed public engagement/outreach within their work may find this group particularly useful, as it’s an opportunity to reflect on the evidence base for engagement and draw from research to inform our practice.

  • We meet online via Teams, with occasional meetings in-person with invited speakers.
  • Readings are shared at least a month before each meeting but if you don’t have time to read it all, you are still welcome to join us and take part in the conversation.
  • Group members are encouraged to suggest readings and are welcome to volunteer to facilitate discussions (if they would like to).

If you would like to join the group and be included in calendar invites and Teams links for upcoming meetings, please complete this short form.

If you have any questions or would like to know more, please contact us and check out our webpage for more details

The Petri Dish: Making Science Social

Welcome to The Petri Dish, we are a community made for scientists, by scientists, to promote more interdisciplinary social conversations for early career researchers.

We aim to bring together scientists from all disciplines across industry, academia and start-ups by providing events, and a space to reach out to people with varying expertise. We hope to not only use this community to talk about our own work and passions, but to use the network to foster relationships and collaborations across disciplines.

Help us tailor TPD to you by filling out our form: https://lnkd.in/e5ibtWnm

If you want to be involved as a team member please reach out to: thepetridish1@gmail.com

Upload your research seminar through Cassyni, for free

Cassyni is a platform for universities to organise, run, and publish online seminars in which researchers talk about their latest work. Seminar recordings are enhanced using Cassyni’s proprietary AI technology to produce high quality transcripts, extract slides, and resolve references to scholarly works contained in the talk, linking seminars to the wider scholarly literature. The enhanced recording is then published with a DOI making it part of the scholarly record.  

Funded through the Imperial Experience Project, in 2023-2024, the Graduate School is piloting a collaboration with Cassyni, to provide all Imperial PhD students the opportunity to publish a seminar about their research, for free, helping to increase the impact and visibility of their work and build research connections.

Once published your seminar will receive a citable DOI giving you another research output to add to your academic CV, helping you to stand out to future employers and increasing the impact of your research.

Find out more and access the dedicated Imperial sign-up portal

Advice, support and funding for publishing open access books

We recommend that authors ask fellow academics in their department for discipline-specific advice on where to publish monographs and edited collections. For authors with a particular interest in publishing open access, the Directory of Open Access Books is a good resource for finding trusted publishers, and can be searched by subject, language, and publisher.

If you are funded by one of the research councils that make up UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), their new Open Access Policy requires that monographs, books chapters and edited collections agreed with publishers from 1 January 2024 are made open access with a Creative Commons licence within 12 months of publication. This can be via a publisher’s website, platform or a repository, such as Spiral. Please contact the Open Access team (openaccess@imperial.ac.uk) for more information if this applies to you.

If you hold a grant from the Wellcome Trust, their policy requires that you approach them about making any books or book chapters you author available from NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC. Where an open access publishing fee has been charged, works should be immediately available without embargo and licensed to support their re-use, preferably with a CC BY licence.