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:

• University College London Centre for Forensic Science
• University of Portsmouth
• Northumbria University Forensic Science Unit
• Science and Justice Research Interest Group, Northumbria University
• Chartered Society of Forensic Science
• Forensic Science Special Interest Group.

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.