Upon accepting the invitation and creating an account/logging into an existing one, you will then be able to access e-Val. This provides you with the necessary administrator tools for your Centre.

Researchers can report information to a centre through a variety of different ways, but they need to be associated with the Centre in order to report. Centre administrators can send an invitation to researchers, and if they accept they will be able to associate any existing Researchfish awards with the Centre (but only if the funder has enabled data sharing with research organisations/centres) and will be available to report on any projects set up by the Centre directly.

1. To generate a Centre invitation to a researcher, select Researchers under e-Val and then click on “Add a new Researcher.”
    

1. On the following page, enter the title (e.g. Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr), initial (or first name), surname, and e-mail address of the relevant researcher, and then click Save.
2. Repeat this process for each researcher who will either report on projects set up by the Centre or who may hold other funding awards relevant to the Centre.

What the Researcher needs to do

When accepting an invitation, if the researcher already has a Researchfish account and has any awards from a funding organisation on it, they will be asked if they wish to associate any of their awards with your Centre. If they choose to do so, then these awards will then be visible to you in e-Val. 

• At any point, the researcher can choose to associate awards with your centre by clicking on Change associated awards at the bottom of their My Awards page (the first page they will see upon logging in)

Researchers can only associate awards if the funder has enabled data sharing with research organisations and centres. If the funder has not enabled data sharing the researcher will see a message to indicate this and may choose to contact the funder if they wish to do so.

 

 

 

1. To create a project, select Awards under e-Val.
    

1. Click the Add a new Project button.
   
2. The following screen will provide three different options.
   
3. The first is “Add Researcher.” In order to create a project on Researchfish, it must be assigned to a pre-existing researcher, so if a record for that researcher has not already been created (see section “2 – Associating Researchers with a Centre” for more details), they can be added manually here. The second option is “Add Project”, which must be selected to begin entering the details of the project. The third option is “Centres overview”, which provides some guidance/clarification. Upon clicking “Add Project”, you will be prompted to enter the details of a project.
   
4. The first thing you will be required to enter is the “Block Grant/Award”. If the project you are creating is a direct result of a block grant that your Centre has received, then select the relevant block grant. If instead, the project represents a funding award by a funding organisation which does not use Researchfish, select “Other”.
5. You will also be asked to enter both a Reference and a Title for the project. The Title will be the “userfriendly” name of the project, whereas the Reference is typically a code that acts as a unique identifier (no two projects can have the same reference) e.g. CEN001. Your organisation may have its own internal IDs for projects, in which case you can simply use these. We strongly discourage entering the same name for both the Reference and Title of a project to avoid confusion. Please also note that once a project is created, its reference cannot be changed. You can then input all other details for the project. One of the questions asks you to stipulate a “Submission Period”. This allows you to stipulate when researchers can submit their projects to you for review (before you then in turn submit everything to the funding organisation). For more information on submission periods please refer to section“5 – Submission.” When creating a new project, you do not have to assign a submission period and you can leave it on the default value of“none”. As part of creating the project, you will be prompted to choose the “PI”. In this context, the PI (Principle Investigator) is the researcher to whom you wish to assign the project to. It is necessary that a record has already been created for that researcher. The project will then automatically appear in that researcher’s Researchfish account, provided they have accepted their researcher invitation.

1. To view projects and funding awards at your Centre, go to e-Val, and then select “Awards”.You can choose the Search Type; either “Centre Projects” or “Funding Awards.”

2. Choose the Search Type, and then enter any search criteria in the fields provided. Then click Show Awards. Alternatively, if you click Show Awards without entering any search criteria, then all Projects or Funding Awards will be returned depending on which Search Type you selected.

You can change which type of information is visible via the Change columns button above the results, and below this button, you can change how many results are displayed per page. If you click on an award reference of a Projector Funding Award, you can view any common outcomes that the PI/researcher has created and attributed to it. If you have searched for Projects, then to the right of each is an “Edit” button. These allow you to amend the details of that Project, except for its Reference; this cannot be changed. If you are viewing Funding Awards, there is a “View” button in place of the “Edit” button. It is not possible to edit Funding Awards, as your Centre did not create these. Only the relevant funding organisation can make any changes. To the left of the results are checkboxes. You can tick any awards that you wish to perform any actions against, and then select “Choose Action” at the bottom of the page. If you have selected any projects, then you can assign a custom-made category that allows you to group awards however you wish, alter the submission period to which awards are assigned (more information can be found in the “Submission” section of this guide), change the response code (these allow you to stipulate if a submission is mandatory or not), or resend an invitation if the researcher has not yet accepted a previous one. If you have selected any Funding Awards, then you only have the option of assigning any categories.

As a Centre administrator, you can submit all the information reported to the Centre to the funder of the Centre as part of an External Centre Submission Period created by that funder. Submitting in the External Centre Submission Period confirms that the report to the Centre funder is complete, but a Centre administrator cannot “sign off” on any data in individual projects/awards; only the project/award holders can do this. The Centre administrator “signs off” on the most recently submitted versions of the individual awards at the Centre, and the submission periods for those awards are managed by either the funder of the award or the centre itself if it created the project. Information that is not submitted or is added after submission will not be included in the External Centre Submission. After researchers have accepted their invitations and you have created projects for them, the researchers will be able to access their projects and attribute outcomes to them. However, just doing these two things is not sufficient; they will also need to submit their projects to your Centre. For them to be able to submit a project, it must be assigned to a Centre Internal Submission Period, and that submission period must be currently open.

To create a submission period, select Active Submission Periods under Submission Management on the navigation menu.
 

1. Click the Add a new Submission Period button in the bottom right corner.
2. Give the submission period a name and stipulate the start and end dates. Save when finished.
    

After creating and saving a submission period, it can then be assigned to projects. This can be done when creating a new project or editing an existing one, or by using the Choose Action… dropdown at the bottom of the Awards page after selecting the checkbox adjacent to the desired Award.

 

If you have assigned a project to a submission period, then when the project enters the dates you have stipulated for that submission period, the researcher will see a Review & Submit button on their My Awards page. If they click on this, they then begin the process of submitting any projects you have created for them to your Centre.
 

 

• To view a list of all projects (and funding awards) at your Centre, select Centre from the navigation menu and then click the Add a New Centre Submission Period button at the bottom of the Centre Submission Period Management page. 

• You can see if the PIs/researchers have submitted or not. 
• If your Centre is within the timeframe of an external submission period, you will also be able to externally submit to the funding organisation, which will send all internally submitted data to them.

1. If you wish to invite somebody else at your Centre to become an administrator with e-Val access, click User Accounts under General Admin on the navigation menu.
    

1. Scroll to the bottom and click the Add a New Administrator button. You can then enter the name and e-mail address of the desired recipient, as well as select which permissions to grant them.
    

1. After filling in the information, scroll ot the bottom and click the Send Invitation button. When the invitation is sent, the recipient will receive an e-mail, which they can then use to create their own new Researchfish account or add the relevant permissions to an existing account.
   

   Check out the Create an Account section at the top of this article for more detailed information.