Promoting Cross-Institutional Collaborations By

Interlinking Research Networking Systems

Eric Meeks, Praveen Angyan, Ed Ward, Aditya Arun Vaidya, Francis Ukpolo, John Burgos, Brian Turner,

Leslie Yuan and Katja Reuter

Clinical and Translational Science Institute / CTSIAccelerating Research to Improve Health

RecognitionThis project was supported by NIH/NCRR UCSF-CTSI Grant Number UL1 TR000004, SC CTSI Grant Number UL1TR000130 and Harvard Catalyst Grant

Number 1 UL1 RR025758-01. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

IntroductionUCSF is partnering with USC and two other California

research institutions to show researchers’ cross

institutional collaborative networks - within their local

investigator profile pages.

Cross-institutional, regional alliances increase

efficiencies and decrease costs by sharing resources

and expertise. By exposing the underlying networks,

we believe we will be able to strengthen existing and

spur new multi-organizational teamwork.

We are leveraging the VIVO ontology and Linked

Open Data standards to aggregate data from 17

research institutions and link it to researchers’ profiles

within UCSF and USC. The effect is to provide users

with a richer, more convenient way to discover a

researcher’s cross-institutional collaborative networks.

The goal of this work is to extend data and functionality

for researchers across multiple installations of RNS,

without sacrificing institutional provenance and control.

Many RNSs are locally installed, which benefits the

system by providing credibility through institutional

provenance, but research collaborations are not limited

to just local institutions. Extending a research

networking system across institutions can drastically

increase its value. Metcalfe’s Law states that the value

of a communication network is proportional to the

square of the number of connected users in the

system: double the amount of users in your system

and you will quadruple your value.

In the past five years, UCSF has worked to make

research networking systems like VIVO and Profiles

more valuable to their hosting institutions and the

biomedical research community at large. Extending

beyond an institution’s virtual borders is the next

logical step in value creation.

Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of California, San Francisco

Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of Southern California

External collaborators are shown

directly in a new “Network” section.

“See all…” link opens a new page

with geographic representation of

external research sites and a list of

cross-organizational collaborators,

with links to coauthored works.

External collaborator’s names link

directly to their home RNS page, the

one with the most institutional

provenance.

AvailabilityUCSF and USC plan to make this functionality

available to the research community via the Open

Research Networking Gadget platform, which is

integrated to both VIVO and Profiles Research

Networking Software.

Since this approach leverages Linked Open Data,

the VIVO ontology and OpenSocial, this

functionality will be available for use by the 50+

research institutions that use current versions of

VIVO and Profiles RNS nationwide.

How it works