Research Administration Online

At CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia 2011 in Sydney, Simon Porter from University of Melbourne talked about "eResearch Administration: The Game will change". He demonstrated the on-line information provided about staff at University of Melbourne. This provides a list of publications by each staff member. They also produce diagrams of who collaborates with who.

University of Melbourne no longer asks staff what publications they have produced and instead harvests this from published sources (a technique I have suggested for ANU). Apart from decreasing the administrative burden for staff it also reduces the problems of verification.

University of Melbourne is expanding this approach to use ViVo to create semantic web based system for universities. This looks useful for other universities.

One disappointment is that most of the detailed information about what University of Melbourne staff research is not avialable to the public. Given that this work is mostly publicly funded, in my view the Unviersity of Melbourne should not withhold it from the public.