Liverpool Elements is being upgraded to improve the system’s support for aspects of the University’s REF2021 submission and to introduce a number of general improvements for users.
The system will be upgraded to version 5.21 on Wednesday, 19 August 2020 and will be unavailable from 8am to 5pm – the refresh of Elements data in downstream systems such as Tulip will also be unavailable during this time.
What’s new?
Version 5.21 brings a significant update to the Reporting Date feature, which will improve the chronological ordering of publication records in Elements, bringing it into alignment with the ordering on staff web profile pages.
Following the upgrade, Reporting Dates for all records will update dynamically based on the various underlying dates present for that publication. Any publication records which had previously appeared at the end of a list of publications due to a missing reporting date will now appear in the correct date order.
The Reporting Dates will continue to be updated automatically as any new dates are added to the publication record. If a user had previously set a publication’s Reporting Date manually, this will automatically change to the new dynamic Reporting Date as part of the upgrade.
A second change relates to an update of the Sherpa Romeo advice available on the file deposit page, with clearer guidance available on which versions of a file can and cannot be shared. Users will see this change when depositing a file for items published in journals indexed by Sherpa.
More information on these changes is available on the Liverpool Elements Intranet. For advice on Open Access and depositing files please contact the Library OA Team: openaccess@liverpool.ac.uk.
Locked publication records
Colleagues in the Library have been working hard to verify the data held for publications in Elements that may be submitted to REF2021. Following verification, these records have been locked to prevent further edits to the data.
The quality of data held against these records is now much more comprehensive, but it has not been possible in all cases to verify all the data. As a result, users may be prompted by Elements to enter the Date of Acceptance to a record which is locked, and therefore be unable to do so. If this happens, please email the Library OA Team who will update the record on your behalf: openaccess@liverpool.ac.uk.
Claiming publications
Lauren Sandford, from the Liverpool Elements Team said: “We’d like to remind researchers of the importance of keeping your publications list up to date by claiming publications, and of depositing your work in a timely fashion in order to be compliant with Open Access policies. This also makes it easier for people to access your research.
“The document ‘Introduction to Liverpool Elements for Researchers’ on our Training and Guidance Intranet provides detail on how to adjust your search settings, and link associated profiles, to help automate some of this process.”