Scheduled Jobs and Services
Elements will carry out a range of automated tasks during the course of each day or week. Typically, these will include tasks such as importing new users from the HR feed, carrying out searches of online databases and emailing users with details of new publications.
Appropriate schedules will have been set during the process of setting up your institution’s instance of Symplectic Elements. However, sometimes you may need to alter a schedule or make a task inactive for a period.
As these jobs apply to the system as a whole, System Administrators can manage them via System admin > Jobs & scheduling > Scheduled jobs.
Each job is listed with a description, the next time and date when they will be carried out and a status:
System Administrators can, at any time, instruct the system to run any of these tasks immediately by clicking on the ‘run’ button. This can be useful if contact between Symplectic Elements and other information systems in your organisation was not possible at the usual time, or for testing the system.
Scheduled Jobs
Job name | Description | Recommended frequency |
|---|---|---|
Database: Data cleanup | Maintenance of database, cleaning out redundant data. Removed in V5.13 | Runs every day |
Database: Delete orphaned data | Maintenance of database: remove data that is no longer relevant to the system, for example, a grant with no relationships. Institutional data is retained. Removed in V5.10.1 | Runs every 30 minutes |
Diagnostics: Data integrity check | Checks for data inconsistencies and reports to Symplectic. Now part of the Synchroniser background service. | Runs every day |
Emailer: Notification | Send notification emails to authors that have newly found publications in pending status associated to their profile. | Runs every hour |
Emailer: Deposit Reminder | Send queued emails to researchers who have publications which are in their Open Access policy but haven't yet been deposited in the repository. | Runs every hour |
Emailer: Assessment reviewer notification | Sends notification emails to reviewers who have assigned reviews that are not yet complete. | Runs every week |
Database: Search for duplicate data | Analyse the database for duplicate publications, and other research data. Suspected duplicates will be offered to users for confirmation. This job is redundant >V5.12 and can be turned off. | Runs every week |
Database: Process HR feed | Process the user feed supplied to this system by your institution. | Runs every day |
Synchroniser: RT1 Repository | Updates all cached repository data held by the system, including Repository Status (e.g. "Live", "In Review", etc), the Public URL of the repository item (if one exists), and the details of the files associated with the item (file name, file url, file type, etc). Please note that changes are made only if the repository-side list-holdings job has run to update the data it needs. | Runs every day |
Synchroniser: SHERPA/RoMEO | Initiate an update of cached SHERPA/RoMEO data for all of the journal articles held in the database. | Runs every hour |
Synchroniser: Refresh deduplication cache | Refresh and clean the cache used during data deduplication. Use this job to initialise and to regularly clean the cache. Removed in V5.14 | Runs every week |
Synchroniser: Statistics | Initiate an update of cached statistics data. Some charts rely on this data, so run this regularly to keep them up-to-date. | Runs every day |
Search: Full re-index | Fully refresh the search engine index. You must run this job once in a while, to make sure your search index is up-to-date. But do not run it too often, or during busy hours, as it takes a lot of system resources. When the full index is completed the status will display "Not Running". | Runs every week |
HERDC: Auto-nomination | Automate the nomination of publications that are either flagged as 'eligible for HERDC' by a user (whilst adding/editing a manual record) and/or where a publication contains a bibliographic record sourced from either PubMed, WoS or Scopus. | Runs every day |
HERDC: Synchronise nominations | Synchronise author/bib data on existing nominations. | Runs every day |
HERDC: Synchronise main chapters | Updates main chapter flags for all accepted nominations of category chapter, in all enabled returns. | Runs every day |
Analytics: Process Cubes | Processes the analytics cubes, updating them with current data from the reporting database. | Runs every day |
Discovery: Re-build the Discovery indices and reload all data from Elements (full synchronisation) | This job will enqueue a request with the Synchroniser to rebuild and reload all the data in the Discovery data indices. You must rebuild the Discovery data indices after upgrading or patching an Elements version. You should also rebuild the data indices after adding, removing or changing data fields and field usages, as these are mapped to the Discovery data indices. Discovery will remain live, but not up to date, during this process. | Only relevant if you have the Discovery Module |
Background Services
Rather than running only at scheduled times, these services run constantly in the background. Rather than having an 'execution' schedule, they have a 'startup' schedule. This periodically checks whether the service is running and, if not, re-starts it. This enables the system to automatically recover from service interruptions such as server reboots.
Service name | Description |
|---|---|
API | Allow external systems access to the Elements database. |
Synchroniser | Process the queue of work needed to keep users' profiles up-to-date with respect to online data sources. |
Reporting Synchroniser | Keeps the reporting database up to date with the Elements database. |
Search Reindexer | Keeps the Search Index up to date with the Elements database. |
Manage Reporting Synchroniser
The management of the reporting synchroniser has its own dedicated page: Reporting synchronisation management.