Advanced Portfolios in WestminsterResearch

Continuing our series of daily blog posts to mark International Open Access Week 2021, we wish to let you know of the exciting improvements to our repository that will allow all researchers, not just those who carry out practice based research, to create over-arching portfolios or collection records, to group and promote your research.

We have recently completed developments to create dynamic portfolios in the VRE, which will display publicly in the University’s institutional repository WestminsterResearch. Initially these were designed to allow practice based researchers in any field to better showcase the outcomes of their research. But the option to use them to collate groups of any type of research output is available.

REF2021 Portfolios

We are beginning by focusing on making the content of the REF2021 portfolios submitting to Unit 32: Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory openly available. As there are potentially many intellectual property, commercial and confidentiality issues relating to this type of material, we will be discussing which elements can be made open with the researcher who created the work, before going live. If you submitted a portfolio to REF2021, we will be in touch, but should you wish that your portfolio is made open sooner, please contact us directly (email repository@westminster.ac.uk), and we can arrange a time to finalise your portfolio for open release.

This new format allows practice-based arts research portfolios to have a clear and well-polished public presence. The portfolio records showcase not only the metadata and items within the portfolio, but also the research process undertaken leading to its creation.

The first example we have of a live portfolio is:

Mykaell Riley’s Bass Culture

We hope to have more available soon.

Further Uses

You can use the portfolios functionality to draw together several individual outputs into one large ‘container’, allowing you to bring together several smaller pieces into an overarching collection. This can be used in any area of research, and you may wish to enter minimal additional information, i.e. only including links to the outputs in WestminsterResearch, giving it a title, and a description to help people understand what is contained. Or you may wish to include accompanying text in the form of Key Facts, Supplementary Information, or even the research process. If you think this may useful to you, and would like to know more, please email repository@westminster.ac.uk

We are able to ‘mint’ DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for portfolios, allowing your research to have a permanent link. Look out for Friday’s Open Access Week Blog on Persistent Identifiers, for more information.