VIVO Conference registration opens this week.  Look for email announcements, tweets, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the nightly news (well, okay, not the nightly news).  The conference chair is Julia Trimmer.  The program chair is Manuel de la Cruz Gutierrez.  They are putting together a great event!  The conference will be in Denver, August 17-19.  Hope to see everyone there.

Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting.  The CNI spring meeting in San Antonio was a great meeting – a chance to catch up with friends, meet new people, share some thoughts about research data sharing (my presentation is available on Figshare here) and enjoy some beautiful San Antonio hospitality and weather.  Lots of interest in VIVO, the role of VIVO as an element of a campus information infrastructure, and the relationship of VIVO to library practice and repositories.

Force2016, Portland, April 17-19.  Will you be at the Force16 meeting in Portland?  I'll be at the OpenRIF workshop Sunday morning, the Organizational Identifiers workshop Sunday afternoon, the OpenVIVO Hackathon Sunday night, and demoing OpenVIVO at the poster session on Monday.  Drop by, say hello.  Next week, VIVO Updates will be brought to you from Portland!

OpenVIVO Project.  OpenVIVO, a hosted, open VIVO that everyone can join, is nearing completion and will have its debut at the Force2016 conference.  OpenVIVO is a proving ground for new ideas – in particular, 1) an ecosystem in which attribution, contribution and recognition of the roles people play in scholarly work can be recorded and used to identify expertise, build teams, and promote the various kinds of contributions people make to scholarly work.  Working with the Force11 Attribution Working Group, and OpenRIF, the OpenVIVO Task Force has implemented new capabilities for VIVO to capture the contributions of individuals on scholarly works.  2) Demonstrate a connected, identified, real-time ecosystem.  OpenVIVO identifies people by ORCiD (see below), works by DOI, journals by ISSN, and organizations by GRID ID.  OpenVIVO can fetch metadata for works identified by DOI or PubMed ID and add them to profiles interactively.  With people, works, journals and organizations fully identified, profiles can be built can be built quickly and accurately.  3) Demonstrate an open ecosystem in which the data assembled about scholars and scholarship is freely shared.  OpenVIVO data will be made available every day.  Anyone can reuse the data for analysis, expert finding, team building, trend and social network analysis and much more.

OpenVIVO focuses on works and identification, and collection of connections between people, works and organizations.  It can provide data to local VIVO installations. It does not have curation, nor the richness of data provided by institutions supporting their VIVOs.  Local VIVOs remain the gold standard for scholarly profiles – complete, institutionally supported profiles representing the richness of the scholarly work and the items of interest to each organization.

Expect to see features from OpenVIVO in future releases of VIVO.

Taking care of business.  It's a busy season at the VIVO Project.  You can help.  Here are some ideas:

  1. Get an ORCiD identifier. ORCiD is the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier – a unique, public, sixteen digit number that you can sign up for, and use to identify your presentations, papers, posters, software, datasets and more.  In addition to the identifier, ORCiD provides a sign-on service that other sites can use to authenticate users.  OpenVIVO uses the ORCiD sign on service.  Everyone should have an ORCiD.  To get an ORCiD, sign up at http://orcid.org.
  2. Plan to attend the User Group Meeting.  The VIVO User Group Meeting wll be held in Chicago, May 5-6.  You can register at http://vivousergroup.eventbrite.com
  3. Help build financial support for VIVO.  Join the 2016 Membership Task Force.  Contact Jonathan Markow
  4. Help us identify needs for VIVO.  I wish I could use VIVO to ...  Complete the sentence here:  http://goo.gl/forms/u7mqR0OrCv. Click the link.  Will take two minutes or less.  We will use the results to help plan future features for VIVO.

Development Call. This Thursday at 1 PM, we will have a Development Interest Group call. Graham Triggs will demonstrate OpenVIVO and discuss design features and development decisions.  This should be a great opportunity to learn more about OpenVIVO and its technical underpinnings.

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director