The McMaster Experts Profile Manager is taking a short hiatus this week before coming back better than ever.
The system will be unavailable from May 23 to 26 for an upgrade, at which point it will emerge with a more intuitive and functional interface.
McMaster Experts profiles will be unchanged and still available during this time, but they will not be updatable. Any websites using the Experts Profile Manager API will also not receive updates during this time.
“While this outage may be a short-term inconvenience for some, we’re excited about what these updates will enable for users,” said Jay Brodeur, associate director of Digital Scholarship Services at McMaster library. "This work by the Experts team is an important first step in our plans to increase Experts’ value to scholars and scholarship across McMaster in the months to come.”
McMaster Experts presents a comprehensive portrait of research at McMaster by highlighting and connecting researchers’ affiliations, expertise, experience, publications, and other forms of scholarly activity and output.
McMaster Experts profiles are public webpages with profiles featuring affiliations, educational background, areas of expertise, research interests, and a record of scholarly and artistic works. The information in the profiles is populated and curated within the Experts Profile Manager.
The McMaster Experts Profile Manager is a Research Information Management System that provides a centralized, reusable scholarly activity record for all faculty members. The system automatically captures position, teaching activity and appointment information from Mosaic.
Users can add additional information about experience, areas of expertise, and background. The publications module is a core component of the McMaster Research Profile Manager. This module automatically searches through numerous publication databases – Web of Science, PubMed, Dimensions, and Scopus, among others – to find academic works such as journal articles and presentations belonging to McMaster authors in order to create a publication record. Users can also add any publication or artistic work that is not automatically added to their profile.
“After the update, the interface of the McMaster Experts Profile Manager will look and feel different, though many of the same workflows and processes for common activities such as curating publications and updating your profile will remain,” said Sabrina Kirby, McMaster Experts research technology analyst at McMaster library. “There are also a number of new features, particularly in expanded reports and dashboards, that users will appreciate.”
Benefits of ORCID iD integration and being part of MacSphere
Before or after the update, users are encouraged to connect their ORCID iD to their McMaster Experts profile.
ORCID is an open, non-profit registry of unique author identifiers. It can be used to identify researchers and link them with their various research outputs and provides a continuous public research profile for researchers regardless of their institutional affiliation.
“Integrating an Experts profile with an ORCID iD allows information to be shared between the two systems, which helps keep both profiles synced and reduces duplication of effort,” said Kirby.
The McMaster Experts Profile Manager is also fully integrated with MacSphere, which is McMaster University’s Institutional Repository. Publications in MacSphere will appear automatically in McMaster Experts profiles.
Claimed publications in the Experts Profile Manager can be used to streamline the deposit of Open Access full text into MacSphere by utilizing the bibliographic information already in Experts to simplify the workflow and reduce the time and effort required to deposit publications.
By depositing the full text in MacSphere, researchers fulfil the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications requirement that peer-reviewed journal publications resulting from NSERC, SSHRC or CIHR grants be freely accessible online within 12 months of publication.
Contact the McMaster Experts team
Need support? Email the McMaster Experts support team at experts@mcmaster.ca to learn more about features and services, or to submit questions or concerns.
Helpful links
McMaster Experts Profile Manager
McMaster Experts profiles
McMaster Experts LibGuide with instructions to integrate ORCID iD
ORCID
MacSphere
Open Access library webpage
