Developing E-science and Research Services and Support at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Libraries.

This paper describes the development and implementation of e-science and research support services in the Health Sciences Libraries (HSL) within the Academic Health Center (AHC) at the University of Minnesota (UMN). A review of the broader e-science initiatives within the UMN demonstrates the needs and opportunities that the University Libraries face while building knowledge, skills, and capacity to support e-research. These experiences are being used by the University Libraries administration and HSL to apply support for the growing needs of researchers in the health sciences. Several research areas that would benefit from enhanced e-science support are described. Plans to address the growing e-research needs of health sciences researchers are also discussed.

The informatics imperative in veterinary medicine: collaboration across disciplines.

Information and data management are essential to support the collaborative and interdisciplinary pursuits of an academic veterinary medicine enterprise, ranging from research conducted by individual investigators, education processes, clinical care, and outreach to administration and management. Informatics is an academic discipline that focuses on the creation, management, storage, retrieval, and use of information and data and how technology can be applied to improve access to and use of these resources. In this article, we discuss the challenges in integrating informatics across a large academic enterprise from a veterinary medicine point of view. As a case study, we describe an example program of informatics at the University of Minnesota designed to support interdisciplinary collaboration.

Research Networking Systems: The State of Adoption at Institutions Aiming to Augment Translational Research Infrastructure.

Fostering collaborations across multiple disciplines within and across institutional boundaries is becoming increasingly important with the growing emphasis on translational research. As a result, Research Networking Systems that facilitate discovery of potential collaborators have received significant attention by institutions aiming to augment their research infrastructure. We have conducted a survey to assess the state of adoption of these new tools at the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) funded institutions. Survey results demonstrate that most CTSA funded institutions have either already adopted or were planning to adopt one of several available research networking systems. Moreover a good number of these institutions have exposed or plan to expose the data on research expertise using linked open data, an established approach to semantic web services. Preliminary exploration of these publically-available data shows promising utility in assessing cross-institutional collaborations. Further adoption of these technologies and analysis of the data are needed, however, before their impact on cross-institutional collaboration in research can be appreciated and measured.

Adoption of Research Networking Systems in the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Consortium.

Research Networking Systems (RNSs) have been of substantial interest for large research organizations as a means of fostering collaboration and increasing the visibility of individual investigators. A survey of the CTSA consortium assessed the state of first generation RNS adoption by member institutions. The survey queried the level of research networking adoption, system diversity, implementation maturity, data sources, use of Linked Open Data (LOD) and the VIVO core ontology, resources required, and individuals and roles profiled. Sixty-one CTSA-funded institutions were contacted and yielded a 75% response rate. The results demonstrate the extent of adoption of Research Networking Recommendations approved by the CTSA Consortium Executive and Steering Committee in October 2011.

Traumatic brain injury rehabilitation: analysis of common data elements.

Physical medicine rehabilitation interventions for post-acute traumatic brain injury (TBI) are heterogeneous and subject to differences based on multi-disciplinary treatment plans [1]. There is no universal knowledge representation (KR) model for TBI rehabilitation which impedes data collection, aggregation, computation, and sharing. This paper describes results of an analysis of the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) TBI "Common Data Elements" (CDE) clinical data standardization set. We conducted this to understand current TBI rehabilitation KR and as a foundational step toward the creation of a domain ontology. A content coverage study was performed on the "Treatment/Intervention" sub-set of CDEs. Results show that coverage of the CDEs is broad but lacks depth to represent the context of data collection in the TBI rehabilitation process. Next steps will be development of a KR model and identification and validation of domain concepts for a foundational ontology.

Direct2Experts: a pilot national network to demonstrate interoperability among research-networking platforms.

Research-networking tools use data-mining and social networking to enable expertise discovery, matchmaking and collaboration, which are important facets of team science and translational research. Several commercial and academic platforms have been built, and many institutions have deployed these products to help their investigators find local collaborators. Recent studies, though, have shown the growing importance of multiuniversity teams in science. Unfortunately, the lack of a standard data-exchange model and resistance of universities to share information about their faculty have presented barriers to forming an institutionally supported national network. This case report describes an initiative, which, in only 6 months, achieved interoperability among seven major research-networking products at 28 universities by taking an approach that focused on addressing institutional concerns and encouraging their participation. With this necessary groundwork in place, the second phase of this effort can begin, which will expand the network's functionality and focus on the end users.