Dear colleagues

This announcement aims to keep members of the research community informed about news and updates in the research space.

UCT is taking its research administrative processes online through the electronic Research Administration (eRA) programme, which will standardise research processes at the university. Many of you will already have used the system, or will do so as we roll out the modules.

By the end of the year researchers will need to use eRA to:

• Obtain internal approval for grant applications to external funders
• Apply for internal funding
• Apply for ad hominem promotion
• Create a researcher profile (which can be displayed onto your group’s website)

You will be informed in more detail about specific functionalities as they go live, so please be on the lookout for communications from the eRA team in your Research Announcements.

Please visit the eRA section on the Research Support Hub to learn more about what eRA is and why it is necessary.

What are the challenges?

The eRA system already includes internal (visible only to UCT members) as well as public researcher profiles. The public profile appears on the UCT Research Portal and offers researchers greater visibility, and can also be displayed directly onto other UCT websites. To create these profiles, eRA pulls data from other UCT source systems, such as personnel data from the HR system. Where there is fragmented and inconsistent data in these other systems it has led to problems in automated uploads to eRA.

For those who have already come across this problem firsthand, we apologise for the inconvenience.

These underlying data issues are an institutional problem beyond the specific remit of eRA and are being addressed by UCT via the University Data Quality Task Team. For eRA this data issue means that staff appointments prior to 2013 and publication data prior to 2016 are not currently automatically pulled into the system.

What is the eRA team doing to address this issue?

For the appointment data, we are working on importing staff appointments prior to 2013 into eRA. We will let you know when these are imported and you will then be able to populate your profile with up-to-date data for those years.

For the publication data the Research Office will offer training opportunities on how to populate your eRA profile with historical publication data.

Please keep an eye on the Research Announcements emailed to you for more about these training opportunities.

What can you do to make sure you are ready for eRA rollout?

If your UCT appointment was held from 2013 onwards, we encourage you to update your profile data and watch our how-to video to find out how to automatically pull in recent publications from databases like Web of Science, ORCID or Scopus onto your eRA profile.

You can keep hidden any information you choose by making it internally visible only.

If your UCT appointment was held from before 2013, then as soon as these data have been imported you will be able to populate your profile and publications.

See our how to update your research profile video and pdf for more on how to hide elements of your profile. If you still experience challenges, please log a call.

The Research Announcement is produced by the Research Office, University of Cape Town.