Scientists will find research partners more easily via national ‘VIVOweb’ network

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Jonathan Corson-Rikert
Head of Information Technology Services, Mann Library

Medha Hemant Devare
Bioinformatics and Life Sciences Librarian

Dean Krafft
Chief Technology Strategist, Cornell Library
Cornell University

An American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grant through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will enable the development of a national, Facebook-like, professional social network that allows scientists to find new biomedical research and partnerships. The two-year grant to the University of Florida includes Cornell University Library and Indiana University as major partners. The new network, called VIVOweb, will be based on VIVO, a technology developed at Cornell University in 2003.

Three Cornell University faculty members will play a key role in the development of VIVOweb, which is expected to help move biomedical research and discovery move faster by fostering alliances, collaboration and information sharing.

“Before VIVO, the Cornell librarians heard a lot of frustration from faculty members who couldn’t find collaborators from different disciplines across campus,” said 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.”

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.

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.

The Cornell effort to develop VIVOweb will be led by Dean Krafft, the Library’s chief technology strategist, Jonathan Corson-Rikert, head of Information Technology Services at Cornell’s Mann Library and Devare.

Corson-Rikert 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. Learn more >>

NIH’s National Center for Research Resources is providing $12.2 million through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for the project. The new project already has provided funding for eight positions at Cornell and more jobs at the other partner institutions.