According to a new article out of the company, “Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, has signed an agreement with EPSRC to provide them with access to SciVal Spotlight, SciVal Strata, and Scopus. EPSRC will use these products and tools to support evaluation of the impact of UK research in engineering and the physical sciences. EPSRC is one of the largest UK research councils and a member of Research Councils UK (RCUK). The decision by the organization to use these products and tools is based on the comprehensiveness of the data and the additional insights available through looking at research from the unique perspective of SciVal Spotlight competencies, as well as the traditional journal classification system.” Read more

VIVO, a semantic information representation system that enables collaboration among scientists across all disciplines, has had a busy summer: The open source project to facilitate the advancement of research and discovery by integrating information about scholars, their activities, and outputs, gained a more permanent home in the DuraSpace Incubator, ensuring a way to continue activities after its NIH grant continuation year ran out. It saw the publication of VIVO: A Semantic Approach to Scholarly Networking and Discovery. And Northwestern University brought its researchers together in a single hub called Northwestern Scholars, an implementation of Elsevier’s SciVal Experts research networking tool (see our story here).

The future is looking pretty bright, too. “We are very interested in funding, research resources, scholarly works, scholars and data sets,” says Mike Conlon, primary investigator of the VIVO project. “As the world moves forward, these things are all inter-related, but that’s been very blurry, especially to organizations and institutions.” Funding agencies, for example, want to know what work was produced as a result of its grants to a major center. It no longer is just a question of who wrote a paper, but who funded it, what tools were behind it, and how was the data produced, and how all these things inter-relate in a scholarly data system.

“Connecting these things becomes the work of the future,” says Conlon.

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