The Research Information Centre (RIC) is a virtual research environment framework being jointly developed by Microsoft External Research and The British Library. We view researchers as extreme information workers and the purpose of the RIC is to support researchers in managing the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research.
Built on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, the RIC extends the core MOSS functionality to meet the needs to academic researchers engaged in collaborative research projects (watch the RIC overview video).
Through the Project Administration Centre, or PAC, domain-specific project site templates can be created, and specific content, tools, workflows, and services can be presented to the researchers in the context of a research project lifecycle (watch the PAC video).
As a framework, the RIC also provides administrative tools to allow libraries and other hosting institutions the ability to author and manage project site templates, manage new project site and user requests, and to archive individual project sites at the end of a research project. Finally, individual project owners are provided with a rich set of building block tools, such as calendars, task lists, wikis, blogs, and surveys with which they can easily extend and customize the functionality of their project sites (watch the extending the RIC video).
Select Features:
- Ability to create and manage project site templates (admin)
- Ability to create and manage project sites and users (Project Owner)
- Customized MOSS lists and libraries
- Federated search to domain-specific literature sources, and integration with MOSS full-text indexing
- Citation formatting tool
- Bookmark and paper recommendations
- RSS Feed integration
- Content tagging, rating, and annotations
- Search-as-you-type filtering of lists
- Pre-defined workflows for document approval
- Search, site action, and annotation histories
- Site archiving
DOWNLOADS
- Download Beta 2 now!
- Next release: Dec. 11 - v.1
DOCUMENTATION
PARTNERS
EVENTS
- UPCOMING
- eResearch Australia, Sydney, Nov. 9-13
- PAST
- Society of Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting, (Baltimore, May 27-29)
PUBLICATIONS
- A Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for Biomedical Researchers, Barga, Andrews, Parastatidis(2007)
RELATED RESOURCES
