Forget serendipity. Research scientists, meet social
networking.
The National Institutes of Health have awarded the University of Florida
– with Cornell University Library and Indiana University
as major partners – a two-year, $12.2 million grant to bolster a national,
Facebook-like, professional social network that enables scientists to find new
biomedical research and partnerships. The new network will be called VIVOweb.
By fostering alliances, it is hoped that biomedical research
and discovery will move faster. The project will rest on VIVO, a technology
developed at Cornell since 2003. It built a comprehensive network of scientists
that identified existing projects and initiated new cooperation.
"Before VIVO, the Cornell librarians heard a lot of
frustration from faculty members who couldn't find collaborators from different
disciplines across campus," Medha Devare, Cornell librarian for
bioinformatics and life sciences. "The idea of VIVO was to transcend
administrative divisions and create a single point of access for scholarly
interaction. Now that VIVO is expanding across institutions, the biomedical
community will be able to benefit from that bird's eye perspective of their
research."
Money for the new grant, awarded through NIH's National Center for Research Resources,
originated from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. This has
already opened eight positions at Cornell and more jobs at the other partners.
Cornell will spearhead the development of the
multi-institutional functionality of the VIVO technology; the University of Florida
will focus on developing technology for keeping each site's data current; and
Indiana University Bloomington will develop social networking tools to enable
researchers to find others with similar interests. Four other institutions —
Scripps Research Institute, Juniper, Fla.; Ponce School of Medicine, Ponce,
P.R.; Washington University of St. Louis; and the Weill Cornell Medical
College, New York City — will serve as implementation sites.
Jon Corson-Rikert, head of Information Technology Services
at Cornell's Mann Library, initially developed VIVO in 2003. As researchers and
administrators embraced the newly created network, a team of programmers,
designers and librarians expanded the project to all other disciplines at
Cornell.
Other universities began to explore the open-source, free
software. VIVO has been adopted for local networks at other universities and
institutions in the United States,
Australia and China. This new
project will follow VIVO's original model and build a multi-institutional
platform for the biomedical community.
The Cornell effort to develop VIVOweb will be led by Dean
Krafft, the Library's chief technology strategist, Corson-Rikert and Devare.
VIVOweb's open Semantic Web/Linked Data approach will empower researchers to
extend their research communities — not just via prior knowledge or
serendipity, but through recommendation or suggestion networks based on common
traits described in the VIVOweb researcher profiles.
Original
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