Upgrade from Research Professional to Pivot-RP Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is Pivot-RP and how does it differ from Research Professional?

Pivot-RP is the new user interface for our database containing the same research funding opportunities you see in Research Professional. But it has significantly more features, functionality and customization options compared to Research Professional.

Some highlights of ways in which the Pivot-RP UI differs from RP:

• The user interface is highly customizable to match your institutional branding (including weekly email alerts).

• Search results can be sorted by relevance.

• Searches can be narrowed down by a faceted navigation sidebar.

• Limited submissions calls are flagged and can receive a global note for demand management.

• It is possible to track individual opportunities and get automated alerts and calendar reminders from the system when our editors update opportunities that you are tracking.

• It is possible to add your institution’s internal funding opportunities to the database

• Integrated researcher profiles allow researchers to get recommended funding opportunities. (Profiles can be integrated w/ORCID.)

• Expanded awards data and search features for previously awarded grants.

• The ability for users to create Private individual workgroups.

• Ability to schedule recurring newsletters to send relevant funding to targeted groups.

• Expanded administrator reports.

• Modern, accessibility first design that works well across all devices.

Download a high-level overview presentation.

What are the cost implications of moving from Research Professional to Pivot-RP?

There are no additional costs to upgrade from RP to Pivot-RP.  Your current RP license terms remain in place.

Is Research Professional going away? Are there any implications for continuing with Research Professional?

There are no implications for continuing with Research Professional at this time. Both Pivot-RP and Research Professional interfaces will have access to the same funding opportunity content. However, Pivot-RP has many additional features and capabilities that will not be added to Research Professional.  

Any significant new features and enhancements will go into the Pivot-RP user interface as we are limited to what can be changed in the current RP UI. So we do envision all customers wanting to be on Pivot-RP as soon as possible. The feedback from customers who have migrated has been great!

Pivot-RP is the new user interface, that you can trial and run in parallel with RP. You decide when to upgrade. You will receive the same service and support regardless of which of our user interfaces you are using.

Can we get a trial of Pivot-RP?

Yes. If you are interested in a trial of Pivot-RP, please get in touch with us. We have set up a dedicated Research Professional to Pivot-RP migration program called “Go Pivot-RP programme” to help familiarize yourself with Pivot-RP.

To request a trial or get more information, contact our Client Services/Support team (https://support.proquest.com/s/rp) or your Renewals account manager, or email the migration team at goPivotRP@clarivate.com and request a trial of Pivot-RP.  

How long can we trial Pivot-RP, and what’s the purpose of the trial?

When you request a trial, we will send you a trial agreement letter for signing and provide you with access to a Pivot-RP site that will run in parallel to your Research Professional service. You can configure and customize Pivot-RP and expose the site to any number of users and administrators at your institution.

Your trial will last approximately 4 months, after which you should be ready to s/witch to Pivot-RP.

The Pivot-RP trial site is a fully functioning version of the service. The purpose of the trial is to allow you and your staff to not only familiarize yourself with Pivot-RP features and functionality, but to configure and customize the site for your institution.

When you are ready to upgrade from Research Professional to Pivot-RP, the trial site will then become your official Pivot-RP site. You will just point your users to the URL for accessing Pivot-RP when you are ready for them to switch from using Research Professional. So any customization, configuration or set-up work you decide to do during the trial will automatically carry over to your live site.

How does my institution upgrade from Research Professional to Pivot-RP?

First, you should request a trial account to familiarize yourself with Pivot-RP and all its features. The trial site will then become your official Pivot-RP site. We recommend that you do a minimal amount of customization, configuration and set-up work in the trial site before you decide to expose the service to all your users. Our “Go Pivot-RP” Migration team is available to guide you through set-up best practices.

When you are ready to go live with Pivot-RP, you would simply provide a link to the Pivot-RP URL for your users to login and access the new service.

If desired, your Research Professional service can remain live and running in parallel for your users for an extended period after you decide to go live with Pivot-RP. (We recommend 30 days.) This will allow you the opportunity to educate users about Pivot-RP and to let them know that Research Professional will be switched off.

Please let our Migration team know the date you intend to make Pivot-RP available live to the users at your institution.

Some institutions may wish to shut-off access to Research Professional when Pivot-RP goes live, others may wish to delay the shut-off for 30 or 60 days. We can accommodate what’s best for your institution. Research Professional will not be shut-off without a clear communication from you.

Is there a step-by-step process or timeline for migrating to Pivot-RP?

You can find further guidance on our Go Pivot-RP program here. Migrating to Pivot-RP is largely a self-service process that follows the five steps below, but have a dedicated team and resources available to help you with each step. We recommend giving yourself about 12-16 weeks from requesting a trial to going live with Pivot-RP.

The steps of your trial and high-level migration are as follows:

1. Enablement – You will start the process by contacting the Migration team (goPivotRP@clarivate.com) and requesting a trial of Pivot-RP. You will also be provided a trial agreement and amendment letter, referencing our DPA (here). We will provide you with access to a trial site that will run in parallel to your Research Professional service.

2. Authentication set-up (optional) – If SSO/Shibboleth authentication is desired for your institution, let our team know at goPivotRP@clarivate.com. Our team does the set-up, but it requires some coordination with your IT team. (This can take 4-6 weeks to set up, but is done in parallel to you trialing and configuring your Pivot-RP site.)

3. Configuration: 

   • You will want to customize the Pivot-RP user interface to reflect your university branding and you might want to consider creating curated lists or searches, groups, newsletters, and/or add internal opportunities – these can be configured at any time during the lead up or post go-live.

   • In parallel to customization activities, Researcher Profiles are created by the Pivot-RP editorial team as part of the set-up of the Pivot-RP service (Profiles take 4-6 weeks to create and this work is started closer to your preferred go-live date.) Configuration and authentication can be configured in parallel.

4. Go Live – Promote Pivot-RP to your users:

   • When you are ready to upgrade from Research Professional to Pivot-RP, the trial site will then become your official Pivot-RP site. Any customization, configuration or set-up work you decide to do during the trial will automatically carry over to your live site. 

   • You will also want to market or promote the new service to your end-users and educate them about Pivot-RP. This can be done by creating some custom training materials or pointing your users to guides, videos and documentation already created by the Pivot-RP team.

5. Moving forward with Pivot-RP/Turning off Research Professional – 

   After you go live with Pivot-RP, we will turn off access to Research Professional only when you tell us it’s okay to do so. We recommend this be done within a 30 to 60 day time period to avoid any unnecessary confusion for your end-user who might potentially be getting alerts from two different systems. Please contact our Support team to let us know that you are fully live with Pivot-RP and that you will want to have access to Research Professional disabled. Future invoices and renewals for the service moving forward will reflect that you are now a Pivot-RP customer. 

What sort of work is in involved from my institution to set-up Pivot-RP?

First, you should request a trial account to familiarize yourself with Pivot-RP and all its features. The trial site will then become your official Pivot-RP site.

Pivot-RP offers several features and tools that are exclusive for those at your institution who will be designated Pivot-RP administrators. You can set-up as many Pivot-RP admins as you would like, and our team can train you on what features are available for admins.

The following work is something your Pivot-RP admins might want to do with your trial site to make the upgrade as successful as possible and increase adoption at your institution:

• We suggest you customize the UI to reflect your own university branding (which can take approximately 20 minutes).

• If administrators would like to create curated lists, groups, newsletters and internal opportunities, these can be configured at any time during the trial or post go-live.

Our Migration team can guide you through this process, but most institutions will not need our help. Documentation and training videos are available to assist you every step of the way.

Is the trial site a ‘test’ site or is it something that would then turn into the University’s live Pivot-RP site?

The Pivot-RP trial site is really a live production site. It will be your main site when you proceed with the upgrade and it “goes live” by simply sharing the URL and access information with your end-users. Whatever configurations and customization you choose to set up in the trial will still be there once you decide to provide access to everyone at your institution.

What does Research Professional need to set-up before our institution can go live with Pivot-RP? Is there any functionality that is not included in the trial?

There are two important elements of the Pivot-RP service that are NOT automatically configured as part of the initial trial site: Researcher Profiles and SSO authentication.
As it is resource intensive on our part to configure Profiles and Authentication, we do not start the process of configuring this until you are certain you will want to go live with Pivot-RP. We ask that you give us about 4-6 weeks lead time to configure your profiles and authentication before you wish to replace Research Professional with Pivot-RP as the live system for your end-users.

• Researcher Profiles – Once you decide on a go-live date to launch Pivot-RP for your end users, our Editorial team will begin to configure researcher profiles for the academics at your institution. (More information on Researcher Profiles below). We will need approximately 4-6 weeks to create profiles for your academics and establish your institution’s organizational structure. 

  Once profiles are complete, you may also wish to review them, request changes, and/or enhance them before exposing the service to your users.

• SSO authentication – In addition, you will need to provide information to set-up SSO/Shibboleth authentication if SSO authentication is needed for your institution. This will require approximately 4-6 weeks of set-up and testing.

  During the time we are configuring profiles and authentication, our team can provide further documentation and marketing or promotional materials that you can adjust and use to successfully launch the service.

Will User Accounts and Saved Searches port over from Research Professional to Pivot-RP?

No. Users will create their own new user accounts in Pivot-RP with new log-ins. To create an account, they will need to use their institutional email address and a create a password of their choosing. Or they may create an account using their institutional SSO credentials, once this is set up.

Users will then want to create their own searches with Pivot-RP. Since the search functionalities are different between Research Professional and Pivot-RP, users would get a limited or inaccurate result set, if we simply tried to mimic their Research Professional searches. It takes just seconds to create and save a search within Pivot-RP and we offer guidance on how to do this. Creating a new saved search has the added benefit of allowing users to familiarize themselves with the new features and functionality of Pivot-RP.

Why are you not able to port over user accounts and saved searches from Research Professional?

There are several reasons your research office and your researchers will benefit from creating new logins and searches for Pivot-RP. First, your research office will have an opportunity to re-engage with your academics as you promote the new features and functionality available with Pivot-RP.  Secondly, by creating their own new user accounts in Pivot-RP, your users will be guided through important workflows to claim their profile, provide consent, and acknowledge privacy policies in accordance with data protection best practices.

In addition, we believe your academics will get better results by setting up new saved searches instead of migrating existing Research Professional ones. Since the Pivot-RP searches function differently due to additional filters, a directly mapped search from Research Professional would not translate into the best results. We can help users with setting up new searches in Pivot-RP, but the process is straightforward, and it takes just seconds to craft one or more searches. 

What changes should I be aware of for Research Professional News?

There are no changes in content. For Pivot-RP users, Research Professional News content displays in a new browser tab. When users first login to Pivot-RP they will see your institution’s home dashboard page and funding search capabilities. To view News content, they would select the News tab from the menu bar at the top.

Research Professional News subscribers will continue to be able to access the same Research Professional News content including our signature magazines Research Fortnight and Research Europe and news alerts. Pivot-RP users will consume the full text of News articles via our more modern user interface: https://researchprofessionalnews.com. Users can access https://researchprofessionalnews.com via direct URL or from the link within Pivot-RP. Depending on how they are accessing the site, they may be initially prompted by RP News to click a link to confirm they are authenticated to view the full text of the article.

What is the Pivot-RP URL? 

https://pivot.proquest.com

Is there documentation or training materials for Pivot-RP?

Documentation can be found here.

Training materials including short videos highlighting various features of Pivot-RP can be found here.

How can I stay informed about changes to Pivot-RP? 

You will find the latest Pivot-RP release notes and webinar recordings here.

What are the Pivot-RP Researcher profiles?

Pivot-RP includes researcher profiles for the purpose of recommending relevant funding opportunities for researchers and faculty. Researchers who claim their profile will get a weekly funding alert which automatically includes the latest funding opportunities that Pivot-RP thinks would be relevant for the researcher, based on the information contained within their profile. Pivot-RP profiles also help the research office share the right funding opportunities with the right researchers and profiles also allow researchers to discover potential collaborators. Our Pivot-RP profiles FAQ can be found here.

How do I set up internal funding calls in Pivot-RP?

Internal Funding calls can be added in minutes by any of your Pivot-RP administrators that you designate with access privileges for adding Internal funding. Via the Pivot-RP admin dashboard, you will find a simple wizard to walk you through adding Internal Opportunities. You can find guidance on how to set up internal calls here.

How do I reach support for Pivot-RP?

The Pivot-RP support team is here to help you at any time. Please send any questions here.