We have been awarded a grant from the Jisc for a project entitled Research Management and Administration – Ethics Extension, or RMAS-EE (#rmasee) for short.
This is a fantastic opportunity for us, and as far as I know the first time a school level support group has been granted such an award. The project is going to involve integration of our home grown Open Ethics project with a system being jointly developed between the Universities of Exeter, Kent and Sunderland called the Research Management and Administration System (RMAS). More information on the RMAS project can be found here: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/rmas/, but it aims to link together a number of separate applications used to manage research applications and awards into a coherent system, where different applications can communicate using a shared communication bus , and message structure. At present there are no applications that manage the research ethics review process that integrate with RMAS, and that in a nut shell is the problem that we are going to solve in the RMAS-EE project.
We will be disseminating our progress through the RMAS-EE project blog which can be found here (http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/rmas-ee/ ).