Friends follow each other on Facebook. Colleagues swap contact details on LinkedIn. And soon, academic scientists eager to forge cross-disciplinary collaborations will have their own network: VIVO.

Credit: IMAGES.COM/CORBIS/B. REA

Funded by a US$12.2-million grant from the US National Center for Research Resources, VIVO aims to allow researchers to transcend disciplines and tap into the collective resources needed to facilitate breakthrough discoveries. The site was first created at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 2003, but for use only at the university (http://vivo.cornell.edu). The money, allocated through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will be used to expand it across universities and to improve its cross-disciplinary search capabilities.

Its creators say that VIVO will help to create the collaborations that are increasingly crucial in science. Michael Conlon, lead investigator on the grant and interim director of biomedical informatics at the University of Florida in Gainesville, argues that web searches generally require too much sifting through results to find the specific researcher capabilities desired for a given project. A VIVO search allows researchers to quickly search for faculty members who have a specific expertise or skill set — for example, a genomics specialist looking to team up with a bioinformatics specialist and a clinician.

Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, VIVO-assembled web pages will be filled with information from official, verifiable sources. For example, academic institutions will provide information about researchers' positions, and publication lists will be pulled directly from scientific journals. This should produce results with much greater specificity than, say, using Google to mine web pages, says Conlon. The site's algorithm searches for scientific topics, and VIVO yields detailed 'hits' broken down into the most relevant subcategories — such as researchers, activities, events, organizations, publications or subtopics related to the term. “If you search for people, you'll just get people,” says Conlon.

Researchers will be able to individualize their sites with detailed information about interests and research opportunities. VIVO membership criteria are still being discussed, and the requirements may differ between participating institutions, but all academics and graduate students should be eligible.

Conlon says that by next year, VIVO will connect seven universities in California, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New York and Puerto Rico. He hopes for many more by the end of the two-year grant, including non-US schools.

Although Conlon cringes at the notion that VIVO will become a frivolous 'Facebook for scientists', he admits that they will use Facebook to spread the word.