Oxford University joins Researchfish

Oxford University has joined Researchfish, an 'online outcomes system' that is now being used by over 71 research funders across the UK.

The Researchfish project, which launched in June 2012, is an online research outcomes system that aims to enable research funders to track the impacts of their investments, and researchers to log the outcomes of their work. The system currently tracks around £4.5 billion in research funding.

Glenn Swafford, director of research services at Oxford explained the university's reasons for joining the project: 'There is a strong alignment of interests between researchers, funders and universities in terms of the demand for excellent tracking and analysis and the ability to tell the Government and other contributors about these results. To achieve this, we need a simple system that asks common sense questions in elegant ways – and that is where Researchfish fits in well.

'We recognise the potential for Researchfish to help us report on activities, outputs and impacts whilst avoiding the need to ask our academic and research colleagues for information twice. We are working to make information from Researchfish available to departments via our Research Business Intelligence portal. We will have some standard reports but we also find the raw data available from Researchfish useful, as departments often have specific questions they need to answer, and their teams can use the system for a level of analysis they are keen on.'