The recent VIVO conference in Cambridge, MA was formed following a successful National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored project. In short, VIVO is an open source researcher profile system that enables the discovery of research and scholarship across disciplines and institutions. It integrates with a number of other systems (HR, grants, faculty activity databases, and more) and has been adopted by a number of associations, funders, and universities in the US and beyond. This interesting topic came to us from The Scholarly Kitchen in their article, “Viva VIVO! Thinking More Broadly About the Scholarly Communications Infrastructure.”
Researcher profile systems are an increasingly important part of the scholarly communications infrastructure, but unfortunately few publishers are aware of their benefit. That was evident by the few publishers who actually attended the conference, but there were representatives from other areas of scholarly communications – librarians, research administrators, technologists, vendors, etc.
It is important for those who work in this field to have a better understanding of the whole research infrastructure, not just the portions that are directly related to their daily duties. The better the understanding the better service can be provided.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
