A list of why VIVO is important to different constituencies - a very pragmatic list with practical examples. Please add to this list as you can.
Open Science & Discovery
- Point to data sets and research products
Basic scientists
- All data is linked within the context of a person - and that data can lead to other valuable sources
- You can individually brand yourself/research
- Links can help your search engine rankings rise quickly.
- Getting funding (linking research to grants).
- Opening research to the world (imagine having your citations displayed on your affiliate society pages and beyond).
- Finding collaborators (simplifies the process of identifying experts in a field and reaching out to them).
- Being "found" by potential collaborators.
- VIVO can help junior faculty and trainees identify mentors.
- Find campus events and take advantage of local opportunities.
- Highlight teaching expertise/responsibilities. Teaching is often a thankless job on campus.
- Keep current on research in my department, on my campus.
- Find core research facilities and people with expertise within the cores.
- Track collaborators.
- Track competitors.
- Find support services on campus - library liaison, support personnel within administrative groups, etc.
- Highlight a changed research direction. Publications often lag ~2 years behind what's actually being done in the lab (Research_Objective statement is a vehicle for this).
- VIVO's ontology makes information easily findable
Clinicians
- Search for upcoming conferences, seminars, workshops, and trainings
- Find resources (labs/facilities) for screening and assessment.
- Find related articles, research conducted within an institution.
- Connect with other research areas or groups within an institution.
- Create work groups for case studies.
- Re-purpose VIVO data for practice websites.
- Gain visibility of work.
- Organize fund raising events to assist with funding research or grants/scholarships.
- Start discussions about new clinical findings.
- Interact with colleagues within the same field to gather insight and ask questions.
- Utilize VIVO to educate and promote preventive health.
- Find referral doctors in other fields.
- Find an expert who specializes in a particular procedure or protocol.
- Enable a physician to identify potential clinical trials that her/his patient might find of interest .
- Enable community groups to identify physicians who might have similar interests for future collaborations (especially important in the age of translational science - taking the fruits of translational research out and ultimately benefiting the community).
- highlight links/content of interest to their patients. For example - a researcher who works with a particular genetic disease might wish to share a link to local and national support groups for patients and their advocates.
Librarians/IS people
- Will help them to stay in touch with their departments and integrate them into various research efforts.
- The semantic web allow them to take our rich research output and make it available, reducing information boundaries (this is what librarians do!)
- Use information gleaned from VIVO to help guide collection development and purchasing decisions.
- Use information gleaned from VIVO to help guide development of new services.
- VIVO's ontology makes information easily findable
Administrators
- Creates a one-stop shop for publicly-available institutional data. Institutional attitudes often come into play when determining what data is incorporated, however.
- The underlying application is created using semantic web compliant standards --making the data transferable between systems, if you later decide to go with another platform. linked open data is available, regardless of the platform.
- Showcase rich research output (showcase publications, grants, etc.) data is easily reusable - so opportunities to restructure the data are endless.
- Could possibly increase funding money, as it allows administrators to connect people and resources when targeted funding opportunities require specific details to be met.
- Assist with locating experts for review panels, symposia, etc.
- Assist journals in locating experts.
- Assists when highlighting research efforts to potential donors (has resulted to real funding for Cornell researchers).
Students
- Find mentors.
- Find research opportunities.
- Identify courses of interest.
- Useful for recruiting new graduate students, trainees.
- Find seminars of interest.
- All data is linked within the context of a person - and that data can lead to other valuable sources
- You can individually brand yourself/research
- Links can help your search engine rankings rise quickly.
Other Benefits
- Search across variety of disciplines.
- Promote your work.
- Maintain your resume/CV - not yet
- Put together review panels/committees
- Find collaborators on projects/grants
- View personal visualizations on co-author networks and grant funding.
- Open source, community-developed tool
- Create public/private groups
- Connect with colleagues
- Display course information
- Share research
- Highlight upcoming talks or presentations that you are giving.
- Get statistics on published papers