Category Archives: Updates

R4J Publish First Journal Article & Offer Repository Demos

Posted on by
47

Happy New Year to you all. We hope you enjoyed the festivities! To start the new year off we have a few exciting announcements to make …

Firstly, the Research4Justice founders have published their first journal article on the development of their Research Database as a novel pre-print server for international justice systems. As founders of an open access platform, we try to ensure that any of our publications are free and accessible to all, and we thank Forensic Science International: Synergy‘s Editor-in-Chief for helping us make this happen.

To accompany this announcement, we have also updated our Justice Toolkit,
and list of international resources. New resources include a link to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which we hope will help you find other high quality, open access journals that contain published research articles of relevance to the justice system and beyond.

“Thank you so much for sharing such a useful resource … I have found incredible insight for different subjects in your posts.”
[JOURNALIST, OCT 2019]

Secondly, we now have a working demo of our Research Repository! In December we started showcasing our demo to a number of UK academics, student researchers and policing professionals, gaining some great feedback.

If you would like to arrange a demonstration and/or discuss how our Research Repository and wider Research4Justice platform could be used by you and those in your organisation, please get in touch with us. Dr Rachel Bolton-King would be happy to talk to you about the platform, how you could implement it within your organisation and consider the appropriate methods for training users moving forward.

Rachel continues to work with Jisc to develop their Open Research Hub for our application, and when the next phase of development is complete a further update will be provided. We hope that you enjoy reading our article to learn more about our new subject-specific resource and look forward to receiving your comments and feedback.

Research4Justice is a not-for-profit initiative for the benefit of global society. To achieve its full potential for all users in the community we will require human support and annual sponsorship. If you and/or your organisation would like to support the development of Research4Justice in any way, then please contact Rachel directly and we look forward to you joining us on this exciting journey.

Share this via:

The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust: A vital source of support for advancing emergency services and criminal justice practices in the UK

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Over the years, The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust has been a significant source of support for practitioners and academics seeking to improve public services in UK society.

Each year, up to 150 Travelling Fellowships are awarded to any UK citizen who is over 18 and proposes a project that will provide a significant impact on our society. The project can be in any field of interest to the applicant and a list of topics can be seen on their website.

In our context, the Trust supports projects that investigate international approaches and enable the sharing of best practice within emergency service provision, forensic science, legal services and prison reform, for example.

In March, the Trust announced those who were successfully awarded 2019 Churchill Travelling Fellowships, including:

If you are interested in any of these projects, click on their name to get in touch with them and click on the topic of their project to access their blog.

Previous Churchill Fellows have covered a wide variety of topics of relevance to the Research4Justice community, including prisoner rehabilitation, challenges in policing, improvements to sexual offence reporting, mental health support and suicide prevention intitiatives.

The reports from some Fellowships can be accessed online and download for reading. You can search the Trust’s report library using specific keywords, categories and even countries of interest to see the full range of projects that the Trust has supported over the years. Some downloadable examples include:

By searching the Trust’s Directory of Fellows you will also discover more about the 2018 Fellows who have just completed their travels. Obviously, due to the nature of our research, you may need to contact a Fellow directly to gain access to their findings if their reports were unsuitable for sharing online.

Have you been inspired to apply for a Fellowship yourself? Then please read the application section of their website where you can register to be informed when applications open on 16 May 2019 for 2020 Fellowships. The categories to which you can apply are extensive and there is also an open category, so your project really can be about anything.

Lots of time left to get your ideas going and good luck with your applications!

Share this via:

R4J Repository, Sponsorship & House of Lords Inquiry

Posted on by
Reply

Sponsorship 

We are proud to announce a new sponsor of Research4Justice, the Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences (CSFS)! This contribution has helped us begin our journey to raise the £15,000 sponsorship needed to launch our repository and secure 1 year of repository provision from August 2019. The deadline to raise these funds is 1st March 2019 so if you or your company, university, organisation or agency is able to find any funds to sponsor our initiative then please email sponsorship@research4justice.ac.uk to discuss this further.

Repository

At the start of November, Research4Justice presented their latest repository developments at the CSFS Annual Conference. There was much interest from the delegates and our poster (pictured below), containing greater detail for academics, researchers and practitioners, can be accessed by clicking this link, requesting access if needed.

A detailed repository timeline is also provided in the poster, although the specific actions for practitioners and academics are summarised below:

  • Practitioners who would like to support repository user testing need to email admin@research4justice.ac.uk as soon as possible so we can identify any issues with viewing or accessing the repository content and work with you to resolve this
  • All academics who want to deposit student research outputs into the repository need to have completed the following by January 2019:
    1. Email admin@research4justice.ac.uk naming their central depositor(s) for their university
    2. Create a free ORCiD account, which will be your personal online identifier and repository login
  • For practitioners to log into and gain the full benefits of the repository you should also register for a free ORCiD account by March 2019.

To get an initial idea of the repository design and workflow, please watch the video below. As the repository is being developed by Jisc as part of a wider research service, the University of Cambridge is just an example and their logo and colours will be replaced with our own in due course.

The demonstration provided here was showcased to us a one of the pilots in October 2018. Further advancements have since been made by Jisc following our initial user testing and feedback. When a more recent demonstration is released we will share this with you.

House of Lords Inquiry

It was really exciting to read that our Research4Justice initiative was mentioned in numerous responses to the recent UK House of Lords Inquiry into Forensic Science. Specifically, ourselves and/or FIT-IN were named in the following written evidence, which can be accessed and read online using the hyperlinks below:

On a final note for this update, our thanks go out for your continued interest and support in this initiative. Please do share this update with your colleagues, students and peers and get in touch with any questions or feedback via our email address, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Share this via:

EAFS 2018

Posted on by
Reply

Last week saw the launch of Research4Justice at the 8th European Academy of Forensic Sciences (EAFS) conference in Lyon, France. The event was attended by over 800 delegates from 57 countries specialising across forensic disciplines with lawyers, police officers and scientists in attendance.

The abstract submitted to EAFS 2018 can be accessed here and our e-poster will be made available through the Staffordshire University Online Repository.

This was our first opportunity to reach such a global audience and some excellent conversations were had; keen interest was shown from both academic researchers and practitioners across Europe who could see the value of our initiative. With the dissemination of our cards, our Twitter followers have now reached over 200, with practitioner followers reaching as far as Abu Dhabi and USA. This shows the great job everyone in the community is doing to help us slowly spread the word across the globe!

In August, the website activity rose again, with visitors from over 11 countries. Three more international universities have shown support for adding students’ research outputs into the database once launched. We are due to meet with Jisc for an update on database developments later in September, so keep watching this space and we will let you know as soon as we have more information! Thank you for your support and patience so far.

Share this via:

For Data Lovers – Our Website Stats for June!

Posted on by
Reply

In June, our #Research4Justice website had 111 individual visitors from 11 different countries & was most frequently accessed through Twitter.

Visitor & viewing numbers

Referral locations

visitor locations

viewing statistics

Thanks to all our @Res4Just followers for your support in expanding our community & whoever it was who posted the Research4Justice link on Facebook!

We now have 164 Twitter followers from across the world and are receiving interest from wider professional organisations who are interested in linking with our forthcoming repository.

Please continue to spread the word about Research4Justice and contact us if you have any ideas, feedback, links to include in the Justice Toolkit or testimonials for us. Our email addresses are now live and we look forward to hearing from you.

Share this via:

Preparing Uploads for Research4Justice

Posted on by
Reply

In March 2018, we released an update for the user community regarding the development of the Research4Justice repository through the Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences.

This update was shared to help supervising academics and higher education instutions to efficiently prepare content (research outputs recently submitted by students) ready for uploading to the repository when it goes live in Autumn 2018.

To read this update please click this link.

As further developments take place we will publish new posts to inform our users, followers and subscribers.

Share this via: