Dear colleagues

The electronic Research Administration (eRA) pre-awards rollout date of 1 October is fast approaching, and the eRA team would like to thank all those researchers who have taken the time to engage with us about the system.

Many of your concerns have centered around inaccurate information on your eRA profile, particularly related to affiliation, job titles and publication information. This is justifiably a source of great frustration and we apologise for the inconvenience and stress it has caused.

To create these profiles eRA imports data from other UCT source systems, such as personnel data from the human resources SAP system, finance data, also from SAP, and student data from PeopleSoft. Until the institution embarked on the eRA project there was limited awareness of how fragmented and inconsistent the data in these various systems is.

This is an institutional-wide problem that has been identified via the implementation of the eRA system and a corrective plan is in progress.

The university executive has acknowledged the gravity of this problem and a task team has been dispatched to address it. But considering the scale of the problem, this will take time.

The rolling out of the eRA system to effectively support research is critical to the continued success of the research endeavour at UCT and therefore cannot wait for the institutional data fragmentation issue – a project that is likely to take years – to be resolved.

It is important to stress that even if your eRA profile is not accurate it will not impact your pre-awards approval applications nor the awarding of funding.

In addition, until your profile is updated you can choose whether you want it to be made visible

See our video and how-to guide on how to update your eRA profile here.

In March this year we put out a Research Announcement outlining the data fragmentation problem and said that the eRA team is working on ways to bypass the institutional data issue and import accurate data into the system.

To date we have made the following progress:

The first priority has been to clean up the most recent data, which for staff has been from 2013 onwards, and for students from 2012 onwards. Currently the team is working on a full analysis to remove duplicates and other problems. Once this is complete, the eRA system will be able to better integrate with HR and other systems to automatically import up-to-date information. In other words, going forward, changes in affiliations and job titles will be automatically updated to reflect what is captured by HR.

This should be completed by the eRA pre-awards rollout on 1 October.

Once this is complete, the eRA team will begin working to import historical data from before 2013, which will be a more challenging task as it will often mean extracting data that originated from systems which are out of use.

We will keep you updated on progress around this project.

Currently the eRA system holds all DHET qualifying researchers’ publication data going back to 2016. This was processed through eRA during the publication count which is done annually with the Research Office.

Researchers can capture their own historical data, as well as publications not qualifying for DHET subsidy, from databases like ORCID, Web of Science or Scopus.

See our how-to guide here to help you with this.

To date nearly 200 pre-awards internal approvals have been successfully run through the eRA system: this includes applications from the Faculty of Health Sciences (where the pre-awards module is already rolled out) and pilots in the other faculties.

Based on this we are confident that the eRA pre-awards module is working as it should, unaffected by the data fragmentation issue plaguing the eRA profiles.

For more information please see the eRA section on the Research Support Hub website and in particular our how-to guides and videos here.

If you have any further concerns or require assistance with your eRA profile please do log a call via Service Now here.

We thank you for your ongoing support and engagement with the rollout of the eRA.

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