Symplectic Elements is a faculty activity reporting system from Digital Science. It replaced the Watermark DMAI product in the Fall of 2024. Elements will be the repository demonstrating the work and achievements of IU’s faculty.
After careful consideration and evaluation, a task force, comprised of nine faculty and nine staff members, made the recommendation to transition from our DMAI application to Symplectic Elements for our Faculty Activity Reporting needs. This recommendation was based on input from faculty across the organization on the needs and opportunities to better support your work.
The transition to Elements is aimed at addressing current issues with data entry and reporting, enhancing user experience, improving efficiency, and providing you with better tools to manage and report your academic activities. Elements offers several advanced features that will streamline the reporting process and provide more comprehensive insights into your scholarly endeavors.
Elements@IU is now available to all faculty via One.IU.
Data is being migrated into Elements in stages, prioritizing 2024 data for the current annual review cycle and data that was manually entered into DMAI. While all DMAI will be imported, due to the structural differences between the systems some pieces will take additional time to be completely transferred.
At this time, the DMAI records for Scholarly & Creative Works and Service & Leadership have been imported into Elements. Teaching Activities, Grants & Contracts, and appointment data are forthcoming.
Several data sources will be automatically fed into Elements including:
- Grant information from Kuali Coeus (KC) will be fed into Elements.
- SIS - Courses information from SIS will be fed into the “Courses Taught” activity type.
- Human Resources Management System (HRMS)- new accounts will be created overnight to allow access for logging into the application along with employee title information will populate user‘s profiles with IU appointment data.
- Harvested publications data – from a variety of bibliographic databases.
Publication data will be harvested and available from a variety of data sources. The following data sources will either be searched automatically or available for faculty to self-search within: arXiv, Dimensions, MLA, ORCID, PubMed, Scopus, SSRN, and Web of Science.
Crossref will be available and refreshed monthly, searching based on identifiers claimed within Elements.
Google Scholar will be available for searching when entering a record manually, however if you use Google Scholar regularly, you can import your works by importing a .bib or .ris file directly into Elements. For more information on how to import Google Scholar publications into Elements, please visit the full guide and screenshots on our Support Materials page.
Integration with the IU ScholarWorks repository will be coming in Spring 2025.
Symplectic Elements is a European product which uses British English. While some screens and fields are configurable, many British spellings are hard coded and we have opted to match the hard coded language for consistency throughout the product.
Acting on feedback from faculty on the former system, there are very limited required fields in Elements. For the majority of activities, the only required fields are a title and date. All required fields are indicated with a red asterisk *. All other fields are optional, and it is not expected that you enter data into every field. It is up to each faculty member how much information is necessary for each activity.
Yes! We are offering a variety of in-person and virtual training options. You can find a link to our upcoming training schedule as well as recordings, handouts, and guides at our Support Materials page.
Yes, this will be configured and available in the Elements reporting framework.
Yes! This system will be available for faculty to access and add activities year-round.
Elements does not have the same attachment functionality as the former DMAI system. Rather than attach documents to an individual activity, files can be attached as part of the Annual Report workflow.
We anticipate the attachment component of the workflow process being available when the Annual Report workflow is broadly available for the 2025 cycle.
Yes! View the Elements demo. (https://youtu.be/aca0GSxfbDw?si=zA3lceYJtfW7tDPX)
Using Elements
Within Elements, you can control your own delegates. Using the main menu, under the “My Profile” tab, navigate to “Settings” and select “Account Settings.” At the top of the screen, you can search for and add delegates. When you no longer need that delegate to have delegate access, use the trash can icon to delete that delegate.
Find the full guide and screenshots on our Support Materials page.
If you have been assigned as a delegate for an Elements user, log into Elements and look for the two person icon on the right side of the top tool bar. Select that icon and then use the tool to identify and select the user you have permission to impersonate.
Find the full guide and screenshots on our Support Materials page.
There are a wide array of ways you can manage activities in Elements. You can find guides on our Support Materials page that will show you how to manually add or edit activities, claim or reject activities, join or split records, and more!
You can review and adjust how Elements is searching for publications related to your Name Based Search Settings. Find the full guide and screenshots on our Support Materials page.
2024 Annual Review Process
If your unit is not participating in the Annual Review Workflow Pilot, you will want to contact your academic leadership for more information about your 2024 annual review process and expectations.
For those units which previously used the “Annual/Multi-Year Report” in Watermark DMAI, a similar report has been made available in Elements, accessible in the “CV and Reports” button in the top right corner of your Elements profile screen. This report will contain the activities reported in Elements within the time period indicated in the “Start date” and “End date” fields.
Due to the major system differences between Elements and DMAI, you may find that you need to compile attachments and other supporting materials outside of the system such as through the use of email attachments when you submit your report or manually including hyperlinks to shared documentation in the Word Document version of the downloadable report.
A complete user guide for this report is available on the Elements Support Materials page.
If you are an administrator for a unit not participating in the Annual Review Workflow Pilot, you can still generate the Annual/Multi-Year Report/Annual Faculty Report. To do this, follow these steps:
- Role Assignment: Ensure you are assigned the “Statistician (RI)” role in Elements for your department or school.
- Request Access: Email elements@iu.edu to request access. Specify the Org code and the unit/school for which you need access.
- Generate Report: Once your access is set up, you can run and generate the Annual Faculty Report for your faculty.
If your unit is participating in the Annual Review Workflow Pilot, you will use the Elements Evaluation module to submit your 2024 annual review. The Annual Review exercises will automatically pull in all the activities you have reported in Elements for 2024. You can then adjust the activities and attach any supporting materials to meet your preference and departmental requirements set by your academic leadership.
A complete user guide to this process is available on the Elements Support Materials page.
Review exercises in Elements are only viewable to those with the appropriate permissions, otherwise, they are private. The faculty reviewee, any assigned reviewers and viewers, and limited system administrators can view the exercises and submitted materials.
Once completed, your review will remain visible for future reference to the reviewee and any associated reviewers and viewers in Elements.
If your unit is participating in the Annual Review Workflow Pilot, you will use the Elements Evaluation module to conduct your reviews. Once faculty members submit their review exercises, the reviews will route up through the stages of reviews. When it reaches your level, you will have the opportunity to review their activities and attachments, including space to rate, provide comments, and upload attachments based on your academic unit’s review expectations.
There are no reports available for the Annual Review Workflow Pilot at this time. We will be developing workflow reports based on the feedback from our pilot participants and the expressed reporting needs of academic leadership across the institution.
Transition from DMAI
All data entered into DMAI prior to its retirement on August 1st, 2024 will be transitioned into Elements as part of its implementation.
This data migration is expected to take several months but should be completed by early 2025.
While the Elements Implementation Team did extensive work mapping DMAI activity data to the fields available in Elements, many items were entered into DMAI using “other” field types. These “other” items may match newly available activities or sub-types available in Elements, but due to the volume and variety of data to be migrated, the Elements Team was unable to tease individual records out from these “other” categories.
We encourage users to use the new types available to them in the manner they best see fit, be that editing migrated DMAI activities or only using the new activity types when entering new information into Elements.
We will not be able to move the attachments over as Elements does not support that on the activity screens.
The last day to access DMAI was October 31, 2024.
If the copy within DMAI was the only copy of an attachment you had access to, please email elements@iu.edu for support.