EARMA Conference Oslo

IBEC Projects Office: An integral, personalised and tailor-made Research Management Support

Format: Fifteen-Minute Discussion Tables

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Organising Support Services & Team Building

We present the unique model of our Projects Office at IBEC, based on providing a global vision of both the research group and institution. This enables a targeted and personalized management which is aligned with the group interests, institutional strategy and (inter)national scientific landscape. We believe this is the future model for institutional Projects Offices, in which Projects Managers are not only administrative managers but represent an integral support system for the researchers.

Brokerage: a tool to support collaborative research initiatives

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Proposal Development

The need for interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial approach in competitive funding schemes for collaborative research is evident. However, how to make this happen? Brokerage or matchmaking is one of the tools to help pre-award consortia building activities with identifying potential partners and elaborating proposal ideas. This tool could be used internally bringing together different faculties, supporting strategic networking with other partner institutions, or exploring new opportunities. The events could be organized as physical, online or hybrid ones.

Easy access to the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions: A toolbox for researchers and research managers

A set of of useful documents and tools, prepared by the MSCA National Contact Points

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Proposal Development

The Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) are among the most attractive yet most competitive funding schemes of Horizon Europe. In order to lower the entry barrier for researchers and RMAs to obtain MSCA grants, the MSCA National Contact Points develop within the EU project MSCA-Net a set of tools for applicants and supporters, e.g. writing guides for the different actions or an FAQ Blog. Attendees to this session will learn about the toolbox, where to find it, how and when to use it.

Finding funds made easy!

Personalized funding opportunities: Engage researchers in searching for funding opportunities.

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Proposal Development

UMC Utrecht is, as an innovative University medical center, always looking for better ways to inform researchers about funding opportunities. In Utrecht we use ResearchConnect as a platform to search for funding opportunities, combined with the integrated search algorithms of another company, Impacter.
The issue we were dealing with is that only a small portion of researchers is engaged in the process of fund searching. We were looking for ways to engage the researchers in this process and the idea was to show personalized funding matches to the researchers in a relevant channel that would nudge them to interact more with the funding database and with us as the research office. 

GraINN Cluster

Bottoms up – grassroot initiative?

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Organising Support Services & Team Building

Inland Norway University for Applied Sciences was formed in 2017 as a result of the fusion of two regional Universities of Applied Science in the Inland Region of South-East Norway. The Region is the size of Denmark and has a population of approx. 370 000 people. The campuses are distributed across the region with a driving distance of up to four hours from one campus to another. All campuses were originally district colleges before the 1970’s and have their own distinct culture and their own RMAs. The GraINN cluster was formed in order to meet the challenges of widespread campuses, different cultures and fragmented RMA-resources. It was led by a grassroot-movement of eager RMAs who understood the need for high quality cooperation across faculties and departments.

How to support researchers in aberrant, unstable situations? Experience of a research funding institution (RFI)

Urgent support of urgent activities in response to urgent situations – experience of a research and mobility financing institution

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Organising Support Services & Team Building

The modern world, full of unusual challenges, requires the RFIs to support the scientists.

Some schemes created in early 2020 could serve for the future, e.g. the Urgency Grants in response to sudden social or natural events with substantial impacts. They enable researchers to investigate the significance of phenomena after their occurrence.

Another scheme resulted from unstable political situation in some regions. Solidarity with persecuted scholars is an obligation of safe countries. Solidarity with Belarus is an example of support provided to students & researchers at risk.

Professional development through best-practice exchange for managers and leadership

NARMA professional development program

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Professional Development and Recognition

NARMA (Norwegian Association of Research Management) has since its establishment in 2013 put professional development of research administration at the center of its mission by establishing initiatives and forums for best-practice exchange.In 2019 a new initiative was launched; a seminar for best-practice exchange at the management level. In this presentation we’ll briefly present the background and overall aim of this initiative, participants feedback and their experiences and lessons learned based on the initiative. 

Professionalisation of research management in Africa

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Professional Development and Recognition

Research management is an emerging profession in Africa, with ongoing efforts to encourage institutional recognition. The Southern African Research and Innovation Management Association, supported by other African associations, initiated a programme as impetus to the professionalisation of research management. The first phase resulted in a Professional Competency Framework and the second phase involved the establishment of the International Professional Recognition Council to lead the development of a framework for a professional recognition programme.

Roadmap to R&I funding

A useful tool to define success R+D+I strategies

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Proposal Development

The Support Unit of European R&I projects is the operational structure allowing a systematic, effective and efficient maximization of participation in R&I European projects of researchers from the Rovira i Virgili University, and thus, of the Campus of International Excellence Southern Catalonia. The most important role the unit has in the pre-award process is facilitating project concept development and project drafting of the non-strictly scientific sections. Roadmapping is a tool that allows us to guide the researchers towards interdisciplinary collaboration with the aim of diversifying the action fields of researchers and promoting talent attraction in emerging areas.

The Evolution of the EU Framework Programmes (Framework 7 to Horizon Europe +)

Future Challenges for Research Support Offices

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Policy, Strategy, Evaluation and Foresight

The European Framework Programmes started in 1984 (Framework 1) and have evolved in one of the World’s biggest research funding programme. The early programmes (Framework 1 to Framework 5) focussed on bringing European researchers together to tackle specific technological problems.
After Framework 6 the scope of the programmes included Social challenges. If Framework 7 the introduction of the European Research Council (ERC) expanded the scope of the programme to Fundamental Research.
This presentation will example the evolution of the Framework programmes, in particular, the evolution from Framework 7 to Horizon 2020 to the current Horizon Europe programme. The presentation will also indicate future directions of the programmes beyond Horizon Europe.

Research Offices in Universities and Research Centres support researchers in responding to immediate calls for proposals. They also support Senior Management and Directors of research groups to plan strategically for European progammes.

Based on the evolution of the Framework programmes what new support will be expected from Research Support Offices? The presentation will look at:
- How can support staff monitor these trends and develop appropriate training for their staff.
- How to support senior management in planning for new European research strategies
- How to encourage researchers to participate in European foresight activities to be part of the EU planning process

Towards a European framework for Recognition and Rewards?

Recommendations from the Netherlands, Finland and Norway

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Open Science & Responsible Research & Innovation

In this session we will take stock of the diverse approaches, regarding the new trend of responsible assessment policies and initiatives towards assessing and recognizing a greater breadth of competencies in academic careers, - considering open science practices. Especially we will compare the three national recommendations from the Netherlands, Finland and Norway to identify common topics and differences, and furthermore; - given that open science is about to become the new norm, are we heading towards a modernised European framework for recognition and rewards?

UCD’s Portal to Digital Transformation

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Organising Support Services & Team Building

This innovative project entailed a complete rethink and redesign of community research services information. We mapped the ‘Researcher Journey’ to deliver a fully user-focused and user-driven information platform. Replacing the service-provider approach with a researcher-centric model resulted in an agile, easy to navigate platform that puts information at researchers fingertips and builds community in an age of digital transformation. Our Communications, Public Engagement and Impact resources have expanded through co-design and collaboration to meet the growing requirements and needs within this space.

VITO Researchers find supporting information without searching, thanks to Voogle.

Voogle is an internal research information system that combines internal data with external data.

Format: Oral 30 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Open Science & Responsible Research & Innovation

VOOGLE makes it possible to search and discover research support information (calls/projects/researchers/…) with one search in regardless of whether the data is managed within or outside our research organisation.

VOOGLE connects internal structured (e.g. Data bases) and unstructured (research) data (e.g. pdf, word, ...) with external (open/fair) data based upon unique (open) ID. A knowledge graph, inspired on the Eurocris model, but extended with other useful objects, such as funding calls / project documents / …, is the start of everything within Voogle.

Linking internal data with external data, brings challenges like where to store/update your data? Which unique IDs do we use to link data? Can we reduce the amount of data that we manage internally? (Some data is kept more up to data outside our organization then inside, think about address data from companies which could be retrieved from ROR.org). How to generate in-depth meta-data automatically, especially from legacy unstructured data?

In an attempt to meet these problems, our organisation switched to a Microsoft Teams environment, But we were able to convince our management to an Data Governance approach to feed, VOOGLE with good data.

In this presentation, we illustrate how to roll out such an approach, not with one big bang, but with a coalition of believers working out a good proof of concept, and then scaling it up with consistency. We will also look further and explain the next steps in Voolge, and how this will help us realising our dream: "VITO researchers find the right information without searching".

Data Protection and Privacy Considerations for the Research Manager

Format: Oral 60 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: International

This engaging thirty minute introductory presentation will cover data protection and privacy issues which research managers need to consider in their daily work administering research and knowledge transfer. The GDPR will be part of the discussion, but this session is distinctive because it will consider basic concepts and practical applications. The key takeaway from this presentation will be enhanced understanding of these issues in the daily workplace and the practical handling thereof. A brief Q&A component at the end will wrap up the session.

The role of open science

What are publishers doing to promote responsible research?

Format: Oral 60 Minutes

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Open Science & Responsible Research & Innovation

In May 2021, the UKRI published a report outlining the funders’ role in ensuring a responsible research culture and assessment practices – highlighting the importance of diversity, collaboration, and the need for change in research assessment. The European Commission identified open access as one of the five central themes of responsible research and innovation. But what about the role of the scholarly publisher? Scholarly publishers play a vital role in facilitating open access and open science policy and practice, but open science requires collaboration among all the stakeholders in the scholarly ecosystem.

This presentation will show practical ways in which collaboration between the key stakeholders in the scholarly research system can facilitate the shift to open science, and bring about real change in how we discover, value, and use research – to the benefit of our shared research system and society as a whole.

European Research Strategy

A systematic approach towards Horizon Europe that activates resreachers.

Format: Pecha Kucha

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Policy, Strategy, Evaluation and Foresight

To foster a systematic approach of PIs and resreach groups towards HEU we developed a workshop series with the following purpose: 1) To develop a structured and personalized application plan for PIs, groups and departments for the various HEU programmes and calls for over the coming 4 years. 2) To outline the support need to execute this plan (capacity building, hiring, matchmaking,…) Our target group: were research groups and PIs who wish to develop a structured plan for their funding activities in the first 4 years of Horizon Europe (European Research Strategy); the workshops were open of all PIs.Outcome:1) PIs had an understand the EU funding landscape, know how to plan ahead and have a clear and realistic process to follow for the coming 4 years, including a detailed schedule for the calls for the first 2 years.2) The reserch groups have developed an understanding and plan for:Who are the ERC PIs,Who are the Marie Curie PIs,Who are the global challenge (consortia) PIs,Who are the “close to industry / innovation” PIs in our group?And how do we get there.3) Increased cooperation between research groups Univerisity internally.4) less and more intersting work for the reserach supportIn this Pecha Kucha we present the concept, methodology and first results of the European Research Startegy.

Funder metadata at 10: where are we and where to next? (Pecha Kucha)

Format: Pecha Kucha

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Policy, Strategy, Evaluation and Foresight

Crossref has been working with funders to help tie grants to research outputs. This aims to help more accurate reporting and save time and manual data entry and searching for funders, research offices and researchers themselves. As part of this work, Crossref has been surveying funder members and the wider funder community to investigate what their needs are in terms of supporting their grantees. We’re also collaborating with other infrastructure organizations - ORCID, ROR and DataCite.

We’ll report back on the progress we’ve made in grant registration, grant identifiers and other methods of improving connections between different research objects. Join us for an update, questions and to see what you can do with openly available grant metadata and suggest next steps for us

How can EAIC members and EARMA members can cooperate together

EAIC: promoting the role of Innovation consultants in Europe

Format: Pecha Kucha

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: EARMA and professional associations

The purpose of this presentation is to present the recently established EAIC, the European Association of Innovation Consultants to EARMA members and present various collaboration opportunities: project management; conference organisation in common; training; common policy position promotion...
EAIC currently gather 50 companies established in more than 20 Member States, its purpose is to elaborate synergies among consultancy companies in Europe. By joining forces on goals of common interest, the currently fragmented landscape of consultancy companies could enhance the impact of actions at European level. EAIC's missions are:
1. Create synergies between European consulting companies specialized in research and innovation (R&I) financing and management to promote the added value their professional services bring to R&I collaborations in Europe and carry out actions of common interests and benefits for its members. ​
2. Enhance a positive image of European professional innovation consulting companies by ensuring and maintaining high professionalism and ethical values among members.​
3. Represent the EAIC towards European institutions and stakeholders to defend the specific expertise and professionalism of EAIC members and acknowledge the increased project impact they deliver to the European research community. ​
4. Identify common issues and goals of its members and pursue them in a coordinated manner on a national level by contributing to national concertation and enhancing direct dialogues with the different representations of the EU Member States. ​
5. ​Facilitate knowledge sharing on best practices and information between members on latest evolutions in the European R&I ecosystem. ​
6. Foster the participation of the private sector to European R&I programmes for stronger impact and exploitation of results. ​
EAIC and EARMA have a lot of common interest in common!

Promote Your Research

UCD’s new website to help researchers increase the visibility of their work

Format: Pecha Kucha

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Impact

Millions of research outputs are published every year. Unfortunately, this means a lot of excellent research gets lost in a sea of publications, prototypes, creative works, and datasets. But there are steps that researchers can take to make their research stand out. UCD’s new “Promote Your Research” website gives advice on how to increase the visibility of outputs, making it more likely that people will discover, use, and cite them. As well as increasing citations, the website helps researchers to build their profile, find future collaborators, and connect with those who stand to benefit from their work (giving it a better chance of having a positive impact on society).It includes tips on how to prepare for publication, how to identify your audience, how to develop your message, how to promote research using social media platforms, how to create multimedia resources, how to reach wider audiences, and how to monitor where outputs are being picked up and used.  In this session, David Bennett, UCD’s Research Impact Officer, will introduce UCD’s new website. He will discuss why UCD felt the need to make it and how they pulled it together, and he will describe the various tools and resources it contains.

With service design to user-driven impact service

Format: Pecha Kucha

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Organising Support Services & Team Building

The significance of impact generated through research has been increasingly emphasized by both academia and society in Finland and globally. Researchers from all scientific fields are held accountable for the footprint their endeavors leave within and outside academia. Strategy of the University of Eastern Finland (UEF) highlights that impact constitutes an integral part of the UEF activities. Open operational culture enhances interaction, thus boosting knowledge transfer, commercialization of research findings and their extensive and collaborative use within the society.In terms of research projects, enabling impact creation denotes that each project phase calls for a careful planning. Optimally it is implemented through a collaborative effort uniting researchers and their projects’ vital stakeholders. Such approach requires user-driven services helping researchers to plan, engage for and evidence any impact they will generate via their research.At the UEF research impact service will be created using service design with the goal of understanding and identifying user needs and improving the user service experience. Design thinking refers to the utilization of design methods in problem solving. It involves a solution-focused and participatory modes. Our ultimate objective is to provide a comprehensive, approachable, informative, specific and verifiable service platform, where the help is only one mouse click away.In practice, this means that the needs of researchers are not assumed. Instead, we – research services personnel - start working with them to find out the bottlenecks related to the impact planning, implementation, verification and mainstreaming. We aim to find out at the grassroots level through interviews which existing UEF services are effective and what is still missing in order to create researcher-centered service paths for all disciplines.“Customer journey”- as it is called in the professional jargon - is a visual description of the service progress from the customer's (researcher’s) perspective. It illustrates the interaction between the service user and the service provider. The thematic sections of the impact service will be embracing, among others, definitions of impact, impact planning tools, toolkit for scientific impact as well as for interaction, dissemination, IPR issues, impact indicators etc.The customer journey design constitutes a concrete development task and will involve cooperation of all units providing impact services at the UEF. It stretches beyond pre-award and post-award research services, including communication services, entrepreneurship and innovation services, as well as library and even legal department.The research impact service platform is still in the conceptualization phase and will be tested with the researchers. It will be made available in May 2022 via UEF user interface website. The process will serve as a prelude to the implementation of two goals mentioned in the UEF 2030 strategy – to foster the impact generated by the university activities and make service design thinking an integral part of all university activities.

Automatic Thesis Agreement Generator Tool for Supporting Fresh Researchers

Format: Poster

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Open Science & Responsible Research & Innovation

As the operating environment of universities of applied sciences becomes increasingly complex, it is useful to adopt holistic approaches to students’ thesis work. As potential future researchers, their thesis work emerges as one of the focal points of many issues contributing to this added complexity. These issues include rapidly developing data protection regulations and methods, varied business cooperation, the open science paradigm shift, increasing awareness of ethical and IPR issues as well as the diversification of education due to multimodal learning environments and e-learning methodologies.To overcome these accumulating challenges, Turku University of Applied Sciences is in the process of adopting a new self-developed tool for all students and their thesis supervisors. The background juridical material for the tool has been created in the “Open RDI, learning, and the innovation ecosystem of Finnish UAS” project co-funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. Thus far, the tool has piloted by a total of 25 thesis supervisors.

How I Became a Research Manager and Administrator (HIBARMA)

The third iteration of the international Research Administration as a Profession (RAAAP-3) survey focuses on how people came into the profession

Format: Poster

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Professional Development and Recognition

You knew from the time you were a child you wanted to become a research manager and administrator when you grew up, right? No one in the history of ever has probably uttered those words. Everyone is different and seems to fall into or meander into the profession along different paths. Unfortunately, there is no degree course to get you into the profession - it is not something that is (yet) on the horizon of most undergraduates. The entry into the world of research management and administration is still uncharted territory, so how do we end up here, in “The best job of all”? This is the question we aim to answer with the 3rd iteration of the Research Administration as a Profession (RAAAP) survey, to be launched in early 2022.Previous surveys (including previous iterations of RAAAP) have provided some information about routes into the profession and recent initiatives for collecting testimonials and personal stories are in place (eg. SRAI call for participation) have added some colour. Our poster will summarise some of these findings and initiatives, and call on the RMA community to actively participate in them.With easy QR Code access, visitors will be called to fill in the RAAAP survey with their data, but also will be able to record and write their personal stories about “How they became RMAs”. The data collected during the EARMA Conference will be part of the overall RAAAP-3 data collection exercise and later anonymised and disseminated to the whole community. There will also be an opportunity to leave details for possible follow-up interviews.In this burgeoning profession, learning more about the pathways leading into our particular craft can help inform future curriculum developers, policymakers, institutional administrators, and indeed those trying to find the right profession for themselves. It will also be interesting to look at the geographical contexts in getting to the profession and to suggest target actions, relative to each context.

REDCap a CTMS management solution for Italian Research Hospitals – IRCCS: simplifying the management of research teams

Format: Poster

Category: Practical Initiatives

Topic: Policy, Strategy, Evaluation and Foresight

“IRCCS” - Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico - are (private or public) Italian Research Hospitals with excellence qualification partially funded by Italian Ministry of Health (MOH) and in some cases affiliated with public universities.
IRCCS research teams handle projects funded by MOH, pharmaceutical companies and private and/or public research grants. Research Administrators need different types of competences to manage this complex reality and to control the progress of milestones and deliverables of the projects.
Researchers and Scientific Directorate work together to achieve strategic goals, to attract increasingly competitively sought after funding, to engage with audiences within the hospital, and juggling the many administrative requests in between all this. In this scenario, we think it is certainly worth to contrive tailored tools for research management and administration.
REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a secure, web-based software platform designed to support data capture for research studies, providing:
1. an intuitive interface for validated data capture;
2. audit trails for tracking data manipulation and export procedures;
3. automated export procedures for seamless data downloads to common statistical packages;
4. procedures for data integration and interoperability with external sources
5. fast and flexible production-level database based on requirement
6. sharing of data between different roles in clinical research
Scientific Directorate of IRCCS Policlinico San Donato (PSD), in 2018 decided to use REDCap for eCRF, patient recruiting, patient monitoring, document management but also for investigator research management with national and international projects registry, clinical trials registry and Scientific Library registry.. These registries included technical specific aspects of research area.
Each Team Leader of a Clinical Unit can control online and update his research activities by REDCap, which is organised and managed by the Research Administration. In three years, the Scientific Directorate organized with REDCap the annually reports of 482 trials, 106 MOH and other funded projects and archived characteristics of 1482 scientific papers. The Trial registry includes information about type of study, Ethical committee approval, insurance policy and ongoing update during enrolment. Grant office database contains for each project the type of funding and deadlines, MOH classification, background, aims and annual results. Scientific Library manager updates for physicians every 3 months all papers printed and researchs could classify the property of each publication. PSD Scientific Direction.
Finally PSD use REDCap for institutional survey for education activities.
Based on the first three years, we are implemented this scientific tool as institutional CTMS aspects and important connection way between researchers and administrators.