EuresTools Dissemination Tracker launched

Klaas-Pieter Vlieg
Eurescom
vlieg(at)eurescom.eu

Peter Stollenmayer
Eurescom
stollenmayer(at)eurescom.eu

Successful dissemination of results by European research projects requires good planning and controlling. Eurescom has made this now easier by launching a dedicated web-based tool for tracking and controlling dissemination activities and outputs. The tool is called EuresTools Dissemination Tracker and is part of the EuresTools suite of modular project management tools.

Good project dissemination starts with coordinated planning of dissemination activities, continues with the agreement of the project partners to the content, and culminates in the successful publication, followed by an evaluation of the dissemination impact. In most cases it is not the content of a dissemination activity itself, but rather coordination, information exchange, and agreement between the projects partners on specific dissemination activities, which causes problems.

In addition, professional archiving of all dissemination activities, proper reporting to the European Commission and timely publication on the project website are important and are either forgotten or require significant management effort.

Standard practice is to control dissemination activities with an Excel spreadsheet or something similar. This works to some extent, but requires a lot of manual managerial interventions and many reminders to ensure that all authors enter their dissemination activities. Sometimes important activities are forgotten to be entered and hence do not turn up in reports or on the project website. This is where EuresTools Dissemination Tracker comes into play.

Benefits of the tool

EuresTools Dissemination Tracker is an online tool and can be accessed via any browser by any contributor who is logged into the tool. The tool helps the author to enter the necessary data by providing templates related to the dissemination categories (e.g. deliverable, presentation at a conference, or book article). The author just has to fill in the fields provided by the tool. The fields have been chosen according to the needs of the projects and according to European Commission requirements for reporting. We had many discussions with experienced project managers to ensure that we did not forget any important fields.

How it works

Two different user roles are distinguished in the EuresTools Dissemination Tracker: the Admin and the Author.

Admins can invite Authors, maintain deliverables, control dissemination and deliverable activities, set status and check required field values for each of them and produce reports on these dissemination activities and on the produced deliverables.

Authors can register to the EuresTools Dissemination Tracker after they have received an e-mail invitation, which is triggered by an Admin. They can then submit dissemination activities by filling out a form. The form is well laid out and provides an intuitive interface for entering the essential information related to the dissemination activity, such as the material type, name/title, dates, venue, responsible partner, co-authors, confidentiality level, status, download link, abstract and impact assessment. Co-authors can easily be selected, if their names have been entered before for other dissemination activities.

After submission of a new dissemination activity, an automatic e-mail is triggered to the Admins. This indicates that the project-internal approval procedure for the dissemination activity can start. Automatic reminders can be set to further support this procedure. After project-internal approval or rejection, an automated e-mail is sent to the Author.

Admins and Authors can easily extract standard and customized reports from the EuresTools Dissemination Tracker. These reports can be either in HTML or in various Excel formats. Report definitions can be saved for recurrent usage. Standard reports can immediately be included in reports, e.g. Periodic Report, and are conformant to EC Reporting Guidelines.

Publishing dissemination and deliverable activities to the project website can be done fully automatic. On the relevant web page a reference script can be included which triggers the EuresTools Dissemination Tracker to automatically render the dissemination or deliverable information upon visiting the page.

Conclusion

The EuresTools Dissemination Tracker helps European projects, especially FP7 projects, to control and coordinate their dissemination activities in an efficient way. Agreeing dissemination documents, publishing dissemination documents on the web and preparing proper dissemination activities tables for reports to the European Commission become much easier by using the Dissemination Tracker. Eurescom has successfully tested the tool in ongoing FP7 projects and offers the Dissemination Tracker as an application service provider to any interested project.

You can find more information on the EuresTools Dissemination Tracker here.

Please send us your comments on this article.