Omega-Psir

Scientific Information System

It archives the institutional publications

... and presents the achievements to the world

simplifies reporting for the management

and national systems.

Omega-Psir ...

is easy in deploying

expandable for new object types

easy to adopt the layout

is equipped with a flexible reporting engin

and it's easy to adopt to the institution structure

Not only repository

It promotes researchers and the teams

It is easy to find an expert or a team

It archives the documents and provides access to them

Archiving

All publications prepared by the institution are safely archived in the system.

Research Management

OMEGA-PSIR is a fully functional system of the class CRIS, it provides the university management with a complete view of research achievements of the University, and reports the achievements to the national authorities.

Sharing

OMEGA-PSIR is a fully functional system of the class of Institutional Repository. It makes possible archiving full texts, and provides access directly to the privileged users. It is compliant with OAI-PMH.

Adaptability

The system can be easily adapted to specific needs of the institution by providing means for defining new objects, reports, layouts, etc. With its services, it integrates easily with other University systems.

"Every institution of higher education should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited in the institution’s designated repository."

Budapest Initiative of Open Access

About us

Our history

The team of Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) has designed and implemented a software (called OMEGA-PSIR), which plays a role of the institutional repository, and at the same time provides functionality of Current Research Information System (CRIS) that supports the researchers and the university management. Based on OMEGA-PSIR, Knowledge Base of Warsaw University of Technology has been implemented. The WUT Knowledge Base stores publications, reports, theses, etc. of the WUT researchers, but also information about research projects run at the university, and other activities of the researchers.

The system is in production at WUT since 2012. It was developed and implemented iteratively, so that since the very beginning various concepts were confronted with the users expectations and requirements. As a result, a high level comfort of working with the system has been obtained, giving rise to very high acceptance from the users. The system influences work of many various groups of users, in particular the librarians, staff of the offices responsible for research projects and international cooperation, but also the management of institutes and faculties.

The system soon turned out to be of high interest for many institutions in Poland. It is distributed to the academic institutions with the source code on the free of charge basis. More than 13 institutions have signed the license. The system is very flexible, so that it is fairly easy to adapt it to the specific needs of deploying institutions. If however, there is a need to implement a new feature we are ready to help.

We have organized an OMEGA-PSIR users club. The users participating in the club contribute in the process of continues development of the system. We are especially interested in preserving compliance with the national and international standards, as well as, good practice. The system integrates with many national systems in Poland; in addition it integrates with various global systems, like WoS, Scopus, CrossRef.

Services

System installation
We do our best to achieve easiness in installing the system. We provide a virtual machine with already installed software. We are ready to install the system on a user server. Also, we offer a possibility to install and maintain the system in the cloud.
Consultancy
Just installing the system on a user server does not solve business problem. It is very important to achieve the state that the software is widely accepted by the users and integrated with the business processes of the institution. Based on our experience we can help in indicating how organizational matters should be solved in order make the system properly running.
Initial filling of the repository with Data
One of the key problems is to fill the system with data at the beginning. The system provides tools for importing data, however in many cases, when data should be loaded from various heterogeneous sources, and with varying data quality, the process can be difficult and time consuming. Based on the existing resources of the institution we make an analysis of data, merging and cleaning of data, and then loading them to the system. Depending on the licenses available at the institution, we can also fill the repository with data from the global databases.
Continuous maintenance of the system and functionality on demand
The system Omega-Psir is distributed on the free of charge basis. If someone wants to have access to the system upgrades, for a yearly subscription we offer upgraded versions of the system. For non-standard implementations and specific requirements we offer our services to adapt the system to very specific needs.
Training and support
We offer help during the system exploitation, including the help desk service. We can also provide training to the librarians, researchers, data entry-staff, trainers of trainers, as well as IT people.

Our clients

Ontology of Knowledge Base

The knowledge base stores all data referring to the scientific activities of researchers: publications, scientific reports, supervised theses, project documents, but also descriptions of project results (prototypes, technologies, software, data, etc.). Whenever needed, the ontology can be extended. All the objects are semantically linked to each other, building a knowledge-rich semantic network.

Bibliographic data

The bibliographic data model is compliant with international standards and recommendations. For export/import the DC standard is applicable. What is essential, the data model is oriented on changes in time, so, in case of changing the author name, all his/her publications are available under the old name and the new one.

Versioning of data

Bearing in mind the quality of data, and their importance in various evaluation procedures, the system uses versioning of records. It is therefore possible to know what kind of changes have been made and by whom.

Repository functions

"Every institution of higher education should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited in the institution’s designated repository." (Budapest Initiative of Open Access). OMEGA-PSIR implements all the functionalities of typical repositories, in particular can deposit full texts and perform efficient search.

Flexible structure of Knowledge Base

Whenever change in metadata structure is needed, the system ontology can be easily extended by new objects and/or attributes. There is no need for programming the changes in the system, instead, based on the XML description of new objects/attributes the system automatically will adopt the database structure and will prepare the data entry forms.

Comfort of working

Completeness of data, and quality are of highest importance for every system. OMEGA-PSIR offers a number of features, such as very ergonomic data entry forms, supporting dictionaries, etc., giving rise to high data quality. In addition, whenever DOI is available, it can be used to fill the form automatically. One can also import data in most accepted publisher formats. All this makes the work of the data entry staff very efficient and error-free.

Assessment of scientific research

The system automatically evaluates the scores of the research achievements according to a specified algorithm, which can take into account various parameters of the publications, such as impact factor of thje journal, number of citations, etc. The system can store historical algorithms, and old IF data, so that older achievements can be assessed by the older algorithms.

Reports

The system has predefined various reports. The researchers can find reports needed for a promotion or yearly evaluation, the faculty managers and deans can produce publication reports for a given period for a person, a team or a unit. One can generate bibliometric analysis. If legally available, the system can use citations by WoS or Scopus.

Defining new reports

The system provides easy ways to define quite advanced report templates, which then can be used by the end-users for producing reports in HTML, Winword or PDF.

Evaluation of researchers and units

The system makes possible to define algorithms for evaluating the research of individual researcher or a unit. Many algorithms can be defined within the system. The algorithms can be prepared in a form of a script, so there is no need to reprogram the system if the evaluation criteria are changing.

Research Plans

The system makes possible preparing research projects plans. The prepared plans define tasks, teams, and timetables, making it efficient to control how the projects are performed by means of time, expenditures and final results.

Presentation layout

The system provides means to define screens for displaying search results – one can easily define output record formats, sorting options and headings. With a basic knowledge of HTML or CSS one can also easlly define a layout of other screens. The formats are not coded in the software, but stored in the database as definitions.

A personalized page for a sub-unit

Every sub-unit of the University, i.e. faculty, division, institute, etc., may wish to present its research achievements on the sub-unit page. And the system makes it possible, so that one can present the sub-units achievements in a personalized graphical layout directly on the sub-unit home page.

Flexible structure of the University

It is possible to define the structure of the University according to the specific needs, taking into account sub-units of the required sublevel (faculties, institutes, divisions, teams, etc). Whenever the hierarchical structure of the University is changing the system takes into account the possibility of splitting a unit, or joining some units into one, or just changing the name of a unit.

Flexibility in defining privileges

With the possibilities to define roles and their privileges the system can map any structure to organize the work of various groups of participants, reflecting the specific roles of particular units and people at the University.

Integration woth other University systems

In order to efficiently perform business processes the system should easily integrate with various in-house systems. Omega-PSIR is prepared for such integration. Thanks to API REST and OAI-PMH it can be integrated with almost any contemporary system.