2012-07-26

DuraSpace Incubator to help VIVO sustain technologies and communities for linking information about researchers and research

Winchester, MA VIVO Project leaders and the DuraSpace organization announced today the intention for VIVO to join DuraSpace as an Incubator project, the first step towards establishing the VIVO project as part of a sustainable 501(c)(3) organization. DuraSpace leads the development and improvement of open technologies that provide long-term, durable access to digital assets and is an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit born from a vision to help save our shared scholarly, scientific and cultural record. DuraSpace will provide VIVO with infrastructure and guidance to continue support for a diverse array of project efforts while continuing to develop the core VIVO software and expand the VIVO community.

Research, library and cultural memory communities require efficient methods for describing and linking researchers and research, which is a natural connection point for VIVO, a semantic web-based researcher and research discovery tool that exposes self-describing data via shared ontologies, and DuraSpace, provider of software and services as solutions for open access, institutional repositories, digital libraries, digital archives, data curation and virtual research environments. VIVO will be the first DuraSpace incubated project based on an open source incubator project model that provides access to expanded community affiliations, organizational tools, and mentorship towards adopting open source best practices.

VIVO is committed to facilitating the advancement of research and discovery by integrating and sharing information about scholars, scholarly activities, and scholarly outputs using Semantic Web technologies. Development and enhancement of the VIVO platform along with associated tools, standards, data, services, and expertise will continue to the benefit of all interested parties. VIVO is a fully open platform with a growing worldwide community focused on the collection, connection, sharing, and discovery of information about research. The relationship with DuraSpace ensures that these efforts can move forward efficiently in a sustainable fashion.

The VIVO team looks forward to sharing more information about this development at the 2012 VIVO Conference, August 22-24 in Miami, FL. The conference will provide an opportunity to hear from VIVO and DuraSpace leadership about the details of the partnership, ask questions, and learn how institutions and organizations can get involved in the effort. Please consider joining us at the conference for this exciting discussion. For more information about the conference, please visit http://vivoweb.org/conference.

About VIVO

VIVO is an open source semantic web application for integrating and sharing information about researchers and their activities and outputs at a single institution while supporting discovery of related work and expertise across a distributed network. VIVO is fundamentally interdisciplinary; it enables and promotes the discovery of research and scholarship across traditional boundaries of geography, organization structure and type, academic or clinical or applied domain, technology, language, and culture.

There is a diverse collection of activities associated with the VIVO project, across federal agencies, academic institutions, professional societies, and data providers, as well as a variety of efforts with the Semantic Web and ontology development communities. Significant partners include CASRAI (Consortium Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information), euroCRIS (Current Research Information Systems) and the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) Initiative. Producers of VIVO-compliant data include: the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Consortium institutions, the American Psychological Association and the Publish Trust Project, Symplectic Limited, the Australian-based ANDS VIVO project, and a growing number of institutional VIVO implementers around the world. For more information about VIVO, please visit: http://vivoweb.org.

About DuraSpace

DuraSpace is an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization founded in 2009 when the Fedora Commons organization and the DSpace Foundation, two of the largest providers of open source repository software, joined to pursue a common mission to preserve our shared scholarly, scientific and cultural record. The DuraSpace community includes more than 1,500 worldwide institutions that use DSpace or Fedora open source repository software to provide durable access to documents, imagery and media. DuraSpace is the home of DuraCloud, an emerging cloud-based service that leverages existing cloud infrastructure to enable durability and access to digital content. The DuraSpace team includes recognized leaders and experts in the management of digital information. The team works with an active and diverse international community committed to the durability of digital resources. For more information please visit: http://duraspace.org.

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