Communications and Information Services (CIS) has a broad remit relating to the flow of information inside and outside SCRI. We aim to promote good relations with a wide range of stakeholders and customers.

CIS promotes the work of SCRI online, on television and radio, in print and in a vast range of specialist, industry and academic publications. We want the world to know about our scientific research and innovation. We also respond to requests from journalists and help provide experts to give opinions on national and international news stories, including climate change.

The team is responsible for organising visits to SCRI and attendance at exhibitions, conferences and public events. We want to promote the scientific work of SCRI to fellow scientists, the agricultural industry, politicians, the general public, school children and students.

Successful industry events include Cereals in Practice, Potatoes in Practice and Fruit for the Future. Many school children and students visit learn more about SCRI’s work through visits to The Living Field Community Garden and Advanced Higher open days for biology students are also very popular.

Public events that SCRI attend include the Royal Highland Show and Dundee Flower and Food Festival. SCRI also hosts events for the public including the highly successful Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF) Open Farm Sunday.

Our Visual Aids Unit provides a service presenting the work of SCRI through scientific posters shown at conferences throughout the world and displays for public events. We also operate the website to share our knowledge, promote our research and to entertain and educate.

Our library and information service offer a full service to staff. We have moved towards making as much electronic information available at scientists’ desks as possible with subscriptions to electronic bibliographic databases and journals. There is also printed scientific literature housed in the library.

Information Technology

Information Technology underpins all our computerised information systems, business processes and information requirements. We have up to date computers which run the common office applications and various specialist computational, finance and network and infrastructure systems, which support and enhance the capability of our technology requirements.

We have a resilient and redundant large scale storage infrastructure which provides scaleable storage facilities to staff. We have a fast (100Mbs) internet connection to FATMAN (Fife And Tayside Metropolitan Area Network) which in turn connects us to JANET (UK Joint Academic Network).

We participate in the eduroam international initiative. More details of this can be found here.

Our main directory infrastructure is based around Active Directory which allows seamless use of email, file and print and portal services. We also have specialist Linux facilities which include a 30 node compute cluster.

A key responsibility for IT is to ensure secure connections for all information transfer, which is achieved by the efficient use of firewalls, spam filtering, automated virus checking at all points, and automatic patch delivery to systems. In addition to the responsibility for the running of the infrastructure and servers and supporting the desktops at the institute, IT is heavily involved in the development of web enabled database applications, technical web development and portal/workflow enhancements.