May 22, 2024 – VIVO Leadership Group Meeting - https://lyrasis.zoom.us/j/9963190968
LG members: Brian Lowe Washington Luís Ribeiro de Carvalho Segundo; L Bryan Cooper; Stefano Pinelli Bridget Almas; Christian Hauschke
Lyrasis: Michele Mennielli; Dragan Ivanovic;
Regrets: Terrie R. Wheeler; Robert Cartolano; T. Derek Halling,
Agenda
Times: 10 AM CDT; 11 AM EDT, 17:00 Europe
Meeting ID: 978 9514 1424
Welcome – All
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1. Selection - Notetaker & Attendance (1 minute)
- L Bryan Cooper Bridget Almas Brian Lowe Washington Luís Ribeiro de Carvalho Segundo Stefano Pinelli Michele Mennielli Christian Hauschke Robert Cartolano
2. Introductions / w/Bridget Almas – Lyrasis’ new Director of Operations for Community Supported Technologies. (5 minutes)
3. Consent Agenda (Please read before meeting.) (1 minute)
- LG approval for VIVO joining as an official “Supporter” of the Barcelona Declaration.
VIVO will be listed on their website along with other key orgs at: https://barcelona-declaration.org/signatories/. Please note VIVO currently adheres to the four “commitments” listed, including #1: barcelona-declaration.org. Our signing in support in no way impacts your institution’s ability to adjust the data sharing default in VIVO, should your institution require.
- Lyrasis Report – Good news on European engagement / new membership (Mic):
- Meeting with Malte Kramer from the University of Muenster (thanks Christian for making that happen!) who’s running a federal VIVO project and the conversation had 2 positive outcomes:
- They’ll become a VIVO member (silver tier for now)
- They are hosting VIVO and providing VIVO as a service to several universities. Malte will be happy to share their experience with VIVO As A Service
- Meeting with João Moreira,FCCN Director at FCT (it’s the Science and Technology Foundation of Portugal). They’ve been DSpace members and supporters for many years. They’re now looking into VIVO for the National PTCRIS and might become VIVO member (not this year, but the next)
- Meating with Natalia Manola, Executive Director of OpenAIRE, she wants to partner with VIVO to develop and offer more complete features with the OpenAIRE
- Meeting with Malte Kramer from the University of Muenster (thanks Christian for making that happen!) who’s running a federal VIVO project and the conversation had 2 positive outcomes:
2. VIVO Software Issue - Washington Luís Ribeiro de Carvalho Segundo (10 minutes)
| Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia – guest Vivian Silva.
3. Columbia University
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– update / needs - Robert Cartolano (15 minutes)
4. Update re: surveying prospective market & marketing (PR?) problems (15 minutes)
5. Catalyst Grant Grant for our survey – rejected – next step (5 min)
6. Possible inviting of Chair of Dspace to speak to LG (5 min)
7. Requiring VIVO users sign up using our Registry of Users. (5 min)
8. LG sub-committee formation (expected duration – 3 months (10 minutes)
meet every two weeks.
- Proposed Charge/Goals:
- Provide Mic with needed information to improve VIVO website
- Prioritize short-term/intermediate term software development to address member concerns
- Provide minor updates to pre-Covid strategic document created by Mic.
9. Closing comments – thoughts? (3 minutes)
Minutes
Wednesday, May 22 at 11:00 EDT
- Introduction of Bridget Almas
- Consent Agenda
- Barcelona Declaration
- Mic and Christian’s efforts to sign new members
- Approval of consent agenda: Moved by Hauschke, seconded by Cartolano
- Approved
- Washington Segundo
- Have implemented removal of Solr instance from VIVO. Works very well in production environment.
- 5 million researchers; 10 million articles and other resources.
- Using ElasticSearch instead of Solr.
- Had problems with Solr’s memory use.
- Christian: Met a colleague of Washington at CRIS conference in Vienna last week. Also found that a lot of institutions are paying a lot of money for BI solutions; this is a lot for universities. All of these BI solutions look at lot like Kibana. This comes with ElasticSearch and delivers a lot of what we all want. Would be in favor of investigating replacing Solr with ElasticSearch. Option to use Kibana would give attractive BI almost out of the box. ElasticSearch has been growing in recent years; people don’t seem as attached to Solr.
- Bridget: This came up in dev call yesterday. There is already some support for ElasticSearch in VIVO.
- Washington: didn’t know about this. Right now we have two load processes.
- Rob Cartolano
- Circling around implementing VIVO on campus. Talking about hosted instance for Columbia. Really want more of a packaged approach to it. ArchiveSpace has done this well. LYRASIS runs as a hosted service. We focus our efforts on building the archives and not writing software. Could be a model that VIVO could use as well. Code is open source but some documentation and pieces around the software requires payment. Community has a better idea of who is using the software. We don’t know all the users and don’t have a direct way of communicating with them.
- Scopus, PubMed Central, Web of Science, and ORCID as data sources for turnkey VIVO would go a long way toward populating the system. Some of this already exists; I just want someone to run it for me. This is a strategic priority for us, and why we’re still a gold member of VIVO.
- Harvester service with established resources, connector to identity management system, reference implementation of discovery dashboard or Solr/API that lets us build a front end.
- Professional services; would love to pay Lyrasis for expertise in cleaning/mapping data, for example.
- Hesitant to look at commercial provider; have had tendency to lock out content and/or change business model. Would lean to non-profit that is aligned with mission and goals.
- Other benefit of using VIVO ontology: shared discovery, aggregated discovery. (International collaboration may be more likely than collaboration on campus.)
- Summary: ingest, connections to people, frontend, aggregated discovery.
- Bridget: How important is the identity crosswalk? Could you use ORCID identifiers for all researchers you need to include in the system?
- Rob: ORCID changes things a lot. Mapping ORCIDs to campus IDs might get us a lot of mileage. Campus ID to affiliation connection can be important. Intellectual output of chemistry department, etc.
- Bryan: Clearly Lyrasis and future ability to provide cloud service is key. When FIU implemented its AWS system we worked with a programmer from Clarivate. Would be a perfect person to hire. Shared discovery is a federal grant waiting to happen. Takes a grant team to come together. Lots of possibilities here.
- Christian: For aggregation have a look at European landscape (OpenAIRE). Focusing only stateside would be too narrow.
- Washington: Look to OpenAlex; could be a fast way to populate VIVO.
- Christian: Good point to discuss this might be September; kickoff of open research information in Paris. Everyone working in this space will be there; big chance for VIVO strategically.
- Rob: Is VIVO feeding OpenAlex currently?
- Christian: Wouldn’t know how to do this currently.
- Catalyst grant
- Submitted as recommended by LG and Lyrasis. One highly critical and problematic reviewer; other reviews were generally positive. Indicates potential problem with reviewer in addition to our own issues. Did not meet threshold for broader vote. Reviewer claimed proposal was not library/archives community driven; seemed to have an axe to grind but not clear why. Reviewer looked at website; website doesn’t tell our story as it needs to be told.
- Christian: new funding opportunity by Ford Foundation; just learned about it today. Will send link. Funding up to 100K dollars for metatopics on open infrastructures, communities, human factors in openness. Deadline is pretty close.
- Washington: Important to study how the website of VIVO can show the power of VIVO. Is not clear for a beginner user. Maybe some graphical analysis that can be done with VIVO; most people don’t understand the problem VIVO is solving.
- DSpace
- Mic: around 90% of Latin American institutions use DSpace. By far the largest open-source institutional repository.
- Bryan: seek any advice comments re: DSpace, but collaboration seems like real sustainability option.
- Bryan: VIVO registry doesn’t capture all users; wish LG could make more tactical decisions.
- Christian: phoning home is problematic from a GDPR perspective. Firewalls often block this as well. OJS had a similar problem; developed a crawler. For VIVO it would be much more difficult because many VIVOs are used internally, not as public website. Don’t know if this is a good thing. Maybe EuroCRIS might help with there directory of Research Information Systems; might be more incentive to register there.
- Bryan: Can we require people to register to download the code?
- Rob: Don’t want to restrict people from using VIVO; how do you encourage membership and build the community? ArchiveSpace had very low cost to join. Still become member if you run VIVO internally. What would be the equivlant for VIVO?
- Mic: Many things should change in the membership structure and benefits. Need to convince people that “open” doesn’t equal “free.” ArchiveSpace has made this clear from the beginning. To change the current mindset where everything has always been open is very hard, but I believe things can still change.
- Bryan: What are top two obstacles?
- Mic: Very long conversation, but we are at point where things need to change because there is no other way around it. (Drops of large membership puts sustainability at risk. This is the first time when we’re in this situation.)
- Mic: Fedora experience: just started tracking usage of platform. Does something similar to Wikipedia; includes reminder to register their instances. Not mandatory. Problem is that if there’s no value in registering, they won’t update if there is a change. Need to provide value even with the registry.
- Bryan: If we don’t adopt some of these business strategies, we’re in trouble.
- Subcommittee formation
- Bryan: What are top two obstacles?