Project Plan Post 7 of 7: Budget (and sustainability!)

Our budget includes commercially sensitive details, so is not shared in full here.

Instead, below you will find some information about how we'll be making sure the project is sustainable and well embedded into the user base and community - providing value for money!

The total cost of the project is £369,288. This can be broken down into the institutional contributions, and JISC's contribution:

We can also break the total cost down into the individual components of the project:

Rather than worrying about risks around sustainability, we've chosen to focus on what success would look like.


From a Symplectic perspective, success would mean that academics in institutions that use Symplectic who had also signed up to Mendeley would have another key data source available to them for finding their publications.  For the data souced from Mendeley (much like arXiv) academics would have the ability to directly deposit from Mendeley into whatever local digital repository were configured for the Symplectic system (be it ePrints, DSpace, Fedora or one of the three commerical technologies that are currently being developed for Symplectic's system).  The deposit mechanism can be made "single click" for the most part and the project may be able to allow people to configure options that will allow full text to automatically be deposited on "approval" of a record.

A user might be able to initiate a "push" from their Mendeley account to an appropriate Symplectic system.  A considerable amount of work might need to be done on authentication methodology here to ensure that target Symplectic systems remain secure.

A further advantage would be that Mendeley would be able to pull data concerning a particular academic from the Symplectic API.  Again security would need to be understood.  However, if successful, an academic could connect to their Symplectic account from Mendeley and automatically pull all their pre-disambiguated records into Mendeley (subject to the records coming from open sources such as PubMed, arXiv or being manually entered).  Where full text exists in a digital repository, a handle will be provided or possibly a file stream object for Mendeley to consume.

Specific budget components: end user engagement and sustainability of embedded deposit solutions


The budget includes 7 person-months for user engagement and support. This will be split between the project partners to deliver coherent support over multiple channels; this is needed because end users will be encountering the project in several ways - through the University's Symplectic deployment, through Mendeley, and possibly through contact with project or repository (DSpace@Cambridge) staff. Laura will be responsible for coordinating these efforts.

The project manager will act as a direct point of contact for other projects in the programme, JISC, and other relevant work. Laura will connect such projects and useful learning to the project team more broadly; in addition she will proactively engage other projects as appropriate to ensure that the programme is well connected internally - for the benefit of other projects, not just this one :)

The budget contains various non-staff costs, which will be allocated to specific activities by the project manager in agreement with the project leads as necessary:

    • £10k hardware
    • £5k travel and expenses split between partners
    • £5k dissemination cost including attending events, sharing information with users and the community, etc
    • £2.5k evaluation costs (assume that this will mostly be used by the University of Cambridge)
    • up to £2.5k contingency funds for the unexpected