Supporting the Latin American VIVO Users Through Targeted Outrearch and Educational Activities
Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad
Problem Statement: VIVO is an open source Research Information Management (RIM/CRIS) system that enables the recording, editing, searching, browsing, and visualizing of scholarly activity using linked open data. Open source RIM/CRIS systems are critical components for advancing inclusive open science at the global level. VIVO is able to meet the needs of different research communities in different regions, while also creating the global interoperability needed to support innovation. But not all the regions have the same level of expertise and resources or have access to the same know-how. This digital divide leads to inequities in the open science landscape which prevents participation and access to benefits from the innovation and enhancements of open infrastructure. The adoption of the VIVO software has been growing outside the United States, while user engagement, community participation and membership have not, at least not at the same path. The VIVO Governance identified a possible strategy to address the lack of engagement and even started to act on it: the first event in Spanish was held in 2021 (with a record participation of over 400 people) and in 2022 the IberoAmerica user group was launched. We seek to transform these activities into a structured strategy that can be effective in broadening supporting VIVO users in non-English speaking countries, increasing the number of members, community participation and in-kind technical contributions VIVO needs more economic resources.
Proposed Activities: With this funding we would like to better support national and regional-scale efforts to adopt VIVO by organizing in-person training, development and the translation of critical resources, and other documentation. Lyrasis (as the Organizational Home of the VIVO Program) and IBICT (the Brazilian Institute for Science and Information Technology) will partner to structure a series of activities in Brazil which can then scale or be used as best practices in other countries in Latin America and the rest of the world. IBICT has gained extensive technical experience on open infrastructures, and particularly on VIVO, with the recent launch of BrCRIS. The architecture of BrCris is based on the description and mapping of connections between the different agents of the Brazilian scientific research ecosystem, among which are: researchers, funders, projects, organizations, laboratory and equipment infrastructures and research results (scientific publications, patents, etc.). It is based on the infrastructure of Brazilian scientific repositories and journals, these aggregated by the Oasisbr Portal < https://oasisbr.ibict.br>, based on the software provided by the LA Referencia network. Information is collected from national and international sources. The idea is to partner with more experienced and resourceful institutions such as IBICT to create a virtuous circle that support organizations with limited capacity. This collaboration could be replicated in other countries or regions and coordinated centrally by the VIVO Governance. Activities to be launched and coordinated will include: Lyrasis: - Creation of new marketing and promotional material to support regional and national engagement (to be translated) - Organization of technical documentation - Organization of training and webinar in English on the latest VIVO releases (to be then translated and reused - Support and coordination of the IBICT effort and activities in Brazil - Participating at in-person events in Brazil IBICT: - Translation of all relevant technical and user support documentation in the WIKI pages (e.g.: manuals, tutorial, user guides, videos, slides, training resources) - Training workshops for knowledge transfer - Support for the creation of institutional CRISs using VIVO, starting with a pilot implementation at a partner institution, to be later replicated at other organizations - Supply of initial datasets from BrCris to feed institutional CRISs Among the goals VIVO Governance is aiming to achieve to support long term sustainability there are: - Engaging developer teams in order to make the development process of VIVO more inclusive and have more participation and code contributions from a broader community than the current one - Increasing the number of members - Strengthening community participation in the definition of the VIVO roadmap
Openness: VIVO is a member-supported, open source software and an ontology for representing scholarship. VIVO encourages showcasing the scholarly record, research discovery, expert finding, network analysis, and assessment of research impact. VIVO is easily extended to support additional domains of scholarly activity. When installed and populated with researcher interests, activities, and accomplishments by an institution, VIVO enables the discovery of research and scholarship across disciplines at that institution and beyond. VIVO supports browsing and a search function which returns faceted results for rapid retrieval of desired information. Content in a VIVO installation may be maintained manually, brought into VIVO in automated ways from local systems of record, such as HR, grants, course, and faculty activity databases, or from database providers such as publication aggregators and funding agencies. VIVO is a network in which more than 140 institutions and agencies in more than 25 countries are implementing VIVO or producing VIVO-compatible data. VIVO uses a number of open-source libraries, including Apache Jena semantic web framework. VIVO itself is currently offered under the terms of the Open Source Initiative BSD License. As everything that is done in the VIVO community, the activities supported by this funding will be described and promoted in the VIVO WIKI pages as well as its website and mailing lists, in two (English and Portuguese) if not 3 (adding Spanish) languages.
Challenges: The lack of a full time person working for the VIVO community will make the coordination of the activities a bit more complicated. The grant will help in supporting the activities in Brazil and the US at first, but the big challenge will be scaling: to create a regular income that will allow VIVO to keep resourcing the activities in different countries and in different languages. Specifically regarding the activities in Brazil, the long distances between Latin American countries and the high travel costs are challenges for conducting in-person training. In addition, differences at the infrastructure levels (equipment, staff, network) among institutions in different countries may require greater effort to adapt methodologies and solve local problems.
Neglectedness: No, we haven’t applied for funding for this before. VIVO passed through a change of Governance and it just started to seeing new adoptions around the world. The development of VIVO was originally funded by the United States National Institute of Health more than a decade ago.
Success: The number of participants in the different workshops, events, and gatherings we will organize is something we will consider to measure the success. In addition to that: - the number of documents/pages produced or translated - The number of community events and the level of participation in these events - the number of new VIVO installations - the number of new active users in the community - the number of new code contributors - the number of new members
Total Budget: $25,000
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: Lyrasis, IBICT, VIVO
LMIE Carveout: The main activities will be run in Brazil but the impact will be on the global VIVO Community
Team Skills: The IBICT team has recently launched BrCris, a CRIS using VIVO as its interface, and has therefore acquired and developed expertise on its implementation, customization and administration, as well as on data and metadata management. The knowledge transfer regarding such experience will be vital to ease the adoption of VIVO at the institutional level. The team is multidisciplinary, composed of computer scientists, programmers, data analysts and librarians. In addition to members of IBICT, the team is also made up of professors and technicians from several Brazilian universities. This team has gained extensive experience with BrCris and other Brazilian projects involving open access platforms and management of large scientific datasets. The Lyrasis and VIVO Team has been working the VIVO Governance activities providing marketing, promotion, outreach and engagement support. It has successfully launched the VIVO IberoAmerica User Group and organized several online and in-person events, also in partnerships with other international organizations.
Submission Number: 67
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