Symplectic Elements is a faculty activity reporting system from Digital Science. It is replacing 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.
We expect Elements to be functional by the end of the 2024 calendar year to support the Faculty Annual Review process.
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.
Before launching fully, the Elements Team will broadly communicate what data has been transferred and what remains in process. Please do not be alarmed if items are initially missing.
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 withing: 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.
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 will be offering a variety of in-person and virtual training options. We are excited to share more information regarding training and resources as we approach the full release of Elements in late 2024.
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)
Transition from DMAI
All data entered into DMAI prior to its retirement on Augst 1st, 2024 will be transitioned into Elements as part of its implementation.
We will not be able to move the attachments over as Elements does not support that on the activity screens.
To download any DMAI attachments, you will need to run the “Supplemental Comments/Attachments Report” and specify the date range. It will then produce a report with URL/Links for users to click and download all their attachments from that date range.
Please note, that the URL/Links from DMAI will most likely not work after November 1st, 2024, so it is advised that you download your attachments prior to that date.
The last day to enter data into DMAI was July 31, 2024. As of August 1st, 2024, DMAI is in a read-only state, allowing users to download reports but not enter additional data.
This transition to read-only will allow the transition team to archive and import the prior DMAI data into Elements.
The last day to download DMAI reports and data will be October 31st, 2024. Beginning November 1st, 2024 DMAI will no longer be accessible.
You are encouraged to download a historical copy of your DMAI data activities for your records. You can do so using the “Rapid Reports” link available in DMAI and running the “*Annual/Multi-Year Report” with appropriate Start and End Date parameters to download a record of all your DMAI activities data.