Using VIVO and Other Tools to Achieve a Strategic Vision

A globally interconnected research world is the norm. This offers great opportunities for communication and collaboration across fields of research, but it also comes with great challenges, in particular for systems interoperability. Many technology products, systems and tools have been created to help universities and other research organizations meet these challenges while achieving their strategic goals. This is creating a new challenge: a confusing stack of technology for users to assemble into a functional research ecosystem.<div><br></div><div>This panel will explore how one university, Texas A&M, selected and implemented a technology stack and is using it to achieve their strategic plan, “Vision 2020: Creating a Culture of Excellence.” Their stack includes:</div><div>• VIVO</div><div>• ORCID</div><div>• Repositories, Vireo & DSpace </div><div>• PlumX </div><div><br></div><div>The panel will discuss the components and the interactions between them, to provide the audience concrete examples of a working, interconnected research ecosystem. </div><div><br></div><div>Texas A&M will describe its process for defining its technology needs, who was engaged, and the questions that drove decisionmaking. They will describe their current technology stack, and the connections between the components. One cross-platform connector used by Texas A&M is the ORCID ID, which is allowing them to integrate information about researcher works and affiliations across various systems and present this information in their VIVO instance. </div><div><br></div><div>ORCID will describe how ORCID identifiers are being used at universities to assert researcher affiliation, and how universities may benefit from integrations by publishers and funders. Consortia approaches to implementation and adoption will be discussed, as well as the use of ORCID in federated identity management systems such as eduGAIN, and how ORCID interacts with identifiers for works and organizations. </div><div><br></div><div>Green open-access institutional repositories are a key component of a research ecosystem. It is the container for the research output conducted at the university. Recent studies have shown that opening up access to research creates more usage and citations for that research. Texas A&M implemented Vireo for theses and dissertations and DSpace for faculty research. </div><div><br></div><div>How is all of this enabling Texas A&M to measure progress toward its strategic goals? As a component of its tech stack, Texas A&M has integrated PlumX to track research metrics in five categories: usage, captures, mentions, social media and citations. Sometimes this is referred to as altmetrics. This part of the panel will include a discussion of what Texas A&M has discovered by tracking metrics across disciplines including output for the humanities. It will also showcase some other use cases of metrics in institutional repositories, analytics reports and researcher dashboards.