The VIVO project is creating an open, Semantic Web-based network of institutional ontology-driven databases to enable national discovery, networking, and collaboration via information sharing about researchers and their activities. The project has been funded by NIH to implement VIVO at the University of Florida, Cornell University, and Indiana University Bloomington together with four other partner institutions. Working with the Semantic Web/Linked Open Data community, the project will pilot the development of common ontologies, integration with institutional information sources and authentication, and national discovery and exploration of networks of researchers. Building on technology developed over the last five years at Cornell University, VIVO supports the flexible description and interrelation of people, organizations, activities, projects, publications, affiliations, and other entities and properties. VIVO itself is an open source Java application built on W3C Semantic Web standards, including RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. To create researcher profiles, VIVO draws on authoritative information from institutional databases, external data sources such as PubMed, and information provided directly by researchers themselves. While the NIH-funded project focuses on biomedical research, the current Cornell implementation of VIVO supports the full range of disciplines across the university, from music to mechanical engineering to management. There are many ways a person?s expertise may be discovered, through grants, presentations, courses and news releases, as well as through research statements or publications listed on their profile--resulting in the creation of implicit groups or networks of people based on a number of pre-identified, shared characteristics. In addition to formal authoritative information and relationships, VIVO can also support the creation of personal work groups and associated properties to represent the informal relationships evolving around collaboration.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative, although complementary, system for the evaluation of the scholarly activities of academic organizations, scholars and researchers, based on web indicators, in order to speed up the change of paradigm in scholarly communication towards a new fully electronic twenty-first century model. Design/methodology/approach – In order to achieve these goals, a new set of web indicators has been introduced, obtained mainly from data gathered from search engines, the new mediators of scholarly communication. Findings – It was found that three large groups of indicators are feasible to obtain and relevant for evaluation purposes: activity (web publication); impact (visibility) and usage (visits and visitors). As a proof of concept, a Ranking Web of Universities has been built with Webometrics data. There are two relevant findings: ranking results are similar to those obtained by other bibliometric-based rankings; and there is a concerning digital divide between North American and European universities, which appear in lower positions when compared with their USA and Canada counterparts. Research limitations/implications – Cybermetrics is still an emerging discipline, so new developments should be expected when more empirical data become available. Practical implications – The proposed approach suggests the publication of truly electronic journals, rather than digital versions of printed articles. Additional materials, such as raw data and multimedia files, should be included along with other relevant information arising from more informal activities. These repositories should be Open Access, available as part of the public web, indexed by the main commercial search engines. It is expected that these actions could generate larger web-based audiences, reduce the costs of publication and access and allow third parties to take advantage of the knowledge generated, without sacrificing peer review, which should be extended (pre- and post-) and expanded (closed and open). Originality/value – A full taxonomy of web indicators is introduced for describing and evaluating research activities, academic organizations and individual scholars and scientists. Previous attempts for building such classification were incomplete and did not take into account feasibility and efficiency.