Deprecated. This material represents early efforts and may be of interest to historians. It doe not describe current VIVO efforts.

CTSA Research Networking Affinity Group

The CTSA Research Networking Affinity Group (RNAG) has a long track record of identifying the need for research networking systems and providing guidance to what systems are available.

Members of the group curate an extensive Wikipedia page detailing available systems and many of their characteristics.

Recommendations have been adopted by vote of the CTSA principal investigators as best practices for research networking.

Ongoing blog posts, etc

11/15/09 Social Tools and Science, a Lorcan Dempsey post on a talk by JISC's Liz Lyon (PDF), referencing:

  • Connotea for reference management
  • * Mendeley (which applies LastFM principles associated with music selections to journal articles)
  • Friendfeed (for threaded discussion and aggregation)
  • Scivee and YouTube (for sharing experimental methodologies and protocols)
  • SciLink and Nature Networks (for social networking)
  • myExperiment (for sharing workflows)
  • eyeLIMS (an open source Laboratory Information Management System)
  • LabLit.com (about science/laboratory culture in the literature and media)
  • ConceptWeb (from WikiProfessional and includes WikiPeople and WikiProteins)

Other systems

List from Katy Börner, 10/13/09

I also cc Mike Conlon here as other VIVO teams might check those systems out as well and it would be great to coordinate efforts.

Are there other systems that aim to support "Researcher Networking" and that we should include?

  • OSU Pro
  • uCosmic (for managing international collaboration)
  • From reactions to VIVO "facebook for scientists" articles:
  • My Net Research, allowing collaborative research on a global scale (from Semantic Web Technologies & Higher Education, 10/7/08)
  • Modern Web 2.0 research portals allow researchers to collaborate on the site itself, manage actual documents and also network with colleagues and other potential researchers.
  • It enables powerful web-based searches and the classification of results into personal taxonomies.
  • The portal uses comprehensive knowledge classifications for categorizing users and their research interests and abilities, allowing researchers to find ideal research collaborators with accuracy.
  • It employs forums, blogs, expert article postings, sophisticated project management and news feeds of the latest research news.
  • In addition, it incorporates specialized research tools that academics use most often, such as survey creation/deployment tools, citation tools, bibliography management and many others.
  • Oxford Building the Research Information Infrastructure project - from its blog: We define research information as the metadata around research activity: descriptions of projects, their funding, outputs, dates; profiles of researchers, their interests, backgrounds and collaborations. Most current initiatives to collect research information within Oxford have their own aims and business processes at the forefront, and, where a particular business need is pressing, making the data collected available for other purposes is of secondary consideration or altogether out-of-scope. The BRII project will produce a scaleable infrastructure to capture research activity data (a public subset of research management data) from all these disparate range of sources. The BRII Infrastructure will enable efficient sharing of research information and creation of research knowledge using a lightweight, noninvasive solution based on semantic web technologies. See also a 10/16/08 post from the Oxford repository project's "less talk, more code" blog describing BRII as "Think Cornell's VIVO but with the idea of Linked Data firmly in mind."
  • The Open Source Science Project: The goal of our project is to create a central forum where we will ultimately produce an entirely research-based scientific curriculum. In addition, to feed this curriculum and ensure the accuracy and validity of its content, we have developed three component resources - a research microfinance platform (where researchers may post project ideas and seek funding - in the form of microgrants/microloans - from the broader online community), a research log platform (where publicly-funded researchers may maintain logs informing the broader population about the progress of their publicly-funded work), and a discussion forum (where we hope to facilitate an atmosphere of openness that will encourage multidisciplinary dialogue regarding issues concerning the research community). Though I don't know the details regarding your particular effort; I think there are a number of ways in which our individual goals - and the resources developed to meet them - may benefit from a degree of collaboration in ultimately producing a consummate resource for researchers and non-researchers alike. (email 10/26/09 from Priyan Weerappuli)
  • Twitter (concept of following)
  • BibApp matches researchers on your campus with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations and to find experts in research areas. With BibApp, it's easy to see what publications can be placed on the Web for greater access and impact. BibApp can push those publications directly into an institutional or other repository.

Here are a few (not listed above) that we highlighted in an upcoming paper. There are a few others (not listed) which focus on paper sharing, information sharing, and there are also other platforms for physicians. [Integration of Web 2.0 Technologies in the Translational Research Environment. Holmes, KL and Dubinsky, EK.]

  • Epernicus http://www.epernicus.com/ A professional network for scientists, started at Harvard and MIT. (Epernicus seems to have a fairly robust community and you can add areas of emerging interest or expertise)
  • 2collab http://www.2collab.com/ Online collaboration tool from Elsevier for researchers that enables to share, connect and discuss research.
  • Labmeeting http://www.labmeeting.com/ Offers academics a no longer free utility to organize, collect, and share scientific papers: $19/month for individual, $199/month for a lab, $599/month for a dept, $1999/month for a whole university
  • ResearchGATE Scientific Network https://www.researchgate.net/ A scientific network that connects researchers. Find research partners, collaborate with scientists and explore journal articles.

ArnetMiner

Arnetminer
6/14/10 Note from (Cornell Library) in China

People called it "Knowledge acquisition from social networks." It is developed by Tsinghua's Computer Science Dept. and has been in use for 4 years. ArnetMiner includes 630 experts, 3 million articles, 5000 conference info and users from 187 countries... and views are increasing by 20% a month. It has been demoed at WWW, KDD, ISWC, ICDM, IBM TJ Watson, UIUC.. "The Dept. is approaching Tsinghua Library for suggested use to connect library resources with the expert discovery system. Tsinghua thinks i has some similarities with VIVO.

Loki

Dave Eichmann, University of Iowa

http://www.icts.uiowa.edu/Loki/

*Grew out a research day in the College of Medicine
*Manual disambiguation of authors for publications
*700 users
*Can do a program project biosketch
*Will do a T32 grant participant table (highly requested feature at Iowa)
*Modular. Users JSPs
*Takes a man a week to produce a custom output feed

As presented by Dave Eichmann to the IKFC of the CTSA Consortium, Jan 8, 2009

Deprecated. This material represents early efforts and may be of interest to historians. It doe not describe current VIVO efforts.