R4J Publish First Journal Article & Offer Repository Demos

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:

R4J Repository, Sponsorship & House of Lords Inquiry

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:

8th EAFS Conference 2018

The 8th European Academy of Forensic Science Conference 2018 is entitled ‘The Forensic Odyssey’. The conference focuses on the discipline’s endless journey continuing research and development, striving to improve the methods, processes and technologies used in the field as well as to provide education and training of forensic experts.

The conference programme will be detailed in due course and can be found here:

 

On behalf of the Research4Justice founders, Dr Rachel Bolton-King will be displaying an e-poster regarding Research4Justice and will be available to discuss and demonstrate Research4Justice throughout the conference. She requests practitioners, researchers and students to hear about the project and gain feedback to empower the community to develop the website content, share relevant resources adding to the justice toolkit and encourage all users to network through this new multi-disciplinary, but subject based resource.

Share this via:

FIT-IN Research Symposium

Forensic (Science), Investigation and Technology – Information Network (FIT-IN) seeks to foster a knowledge sharing network to improve cross-border collaboration between academia, policing partnerships and related stakeholders. The symposium programme provides an introduction to the concept and showcases work already delivered by some of the steering group members and their partners, aiming to attract interest from all relevant parties both within the UK and internationally.

This symposium also sees the launch of Research4Justice (formally ForSci), an online database for the dissemination and discussion of undergraduate and postgraduate research, hosted by Jisc. These endeavours aim to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of policing, forensic science, technology and associated methods and techniques through collaborative information sharing, broadening access to knowledge and partnership across the criminal justice system.

Share this via: