What's New?
Accessibility and disability support activities
To support campus accessibility improvements, faculty can now label any work related to accessibility and disability support such as:
- Participating in professional development opportunities and/or training on accessibility and disabilities
- Course redesign to better accommodate students with disabilities
- Course redesign to incorporate Universal Design for Learning framework
- Addressing barriers for students with disabilities in the classroom and/or workplace
- Disability related research activities
- Disability outreach and programming activities
Scopus added as data source
Scopus is now available as a data source in Elements. Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature containing over 22,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers around the world, covering the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. Scopus has over 55 million records dating back to 1823, 84 percent of which contain references dating from 1996. Publications indexed in Scopus will be identified by Element's automated data search and presented to users for verification. Citation counts will be automatically imported for claimed items.
VTechWorks added as data source
VTechWorks, the university’s digital repository, has been added as a data source for publications. This means two things: first, items from VTechWorks may appear in your “Pending” list for claiming or rejecting; and second, items that you have claimed may now appear as deposited in VTechWorks. You will notice the latter case primarily for open access journal articles and Extension publications. For questions please email vtechworks@vt.edu. (November 2018)
Embargo option available
An embargo option can now be specified during deposit to VTechWorks, allowing authors to observe the embargo period that many journals require when archiving a submitted or accepted manuscript (the publisher’s PDF is generally not permitted in a public archive, except for open access journals). For details on how to request an embargo, see the "How do I..." page. (November 2018)
Privacy settings
The latest version of Elements gives individual users additional controls over who can see their information. A user's profile page is set to "internal" by default so that information on that page is viewable only by other Virginia Tech faculty with accounts in Elements. To make information available for reuse on public facing websites such as department web pages or CollabVT, a user must change the profile page setting to "public". Note that the profile page itself is never available to the general public, this setting allows information in Elements to be accessed by other university systems. The Elements privacy policy (PDF) provides more details on data access and privacy controls. (August 2018)
Preferred name
Elements users can now specify a preferred first name and/or last name. Accounts in Elements are created based on data from Virginia Tech's Banner HR system. Faculty who use names that differ from their name in Banner can specify their preferred name in Elements by navigating to Menu>My Account>Account Settings and scrolling to Preferred Name. (August 2018)
Professional activity import
Faculty participation on university commissions and in professional development activities through NLI and University Organizational and Professional Development will be imported into Elements. (Fall 2018)
Automatic claiming
Elements can now automatically import information about publications found through its online database search if they are associated with certain unique author identifiers. This means that you will not need to review and accept 'Pending' publications if the publication record contains your unique author identifier, such as ORCID, ResearcherID, arXiv or SSRN author ID, or your email address. The publication will be automatically claimed and appear on the 'Mine' tab of the 'My publications' page. To confirm your automatic claiming settions, go to Menu>Manage Publications>Automatic (PDF) claiming. (2017)
MLA database
You can now select MLA as a database to be searched by the Elements EFAR system. MLA indexes publications in the area of language theory and literature. MLA is turned on by default for faculty in humanities departments, and can be activated individually for other faculty if desired. If your searches of the MLA database are not finding records you believe are there, or are finding too many publications that don’t belong to you, your liaison librarian can help. (2017)