Online expertise enhances collaboration

The Johns Hopkins University has made its expertise accessible online, enabling the public to search and view research conducted by the university and its faculty. The portal—powered by Collexis, a developer of semantic search and knowledge discovery software—enables users to learn "who knows what at JHU."

In a recent news release, Collexis reports that its approach has become popular with research-intensive institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health, that want to have a system to identify potential partnerships, translational research projects or other connections between researchers. However, most institutions have limited their systems to internal collaborations. The Johns Hopkins University has chosen to provide public access.

"Collexis’ technology is adding significant support to the way Johns Hopkins collects internal and external information and shares it among key researchers, alumni, donors, collaborators and corporate sponsors," says Bill Kirkland, Collexis CEO. "Traditional online resume or expert directories require researchers to input and update their own information. Our experience is that these systems are incomplete, and the material they do include is often not updated. Collexis, however, builds profiles for each Johns Hopkins researcher automatically. When a researcher has a new paper published, the system updates their profile overnight—meaning our information stays current."

The university has also contracted with Collexis for an ongoing search engine optimization project designed to make its researchers more widely read and identified online through search engines like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.