COLUMBIA, S.C., April 12, 2010 – Collexis Holdings, Inc., a leading developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software, announced today that they have reached an agreement with the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University to link their research faculty utilizing data from Elsevier's Scopus database and the RAMSeS software environment developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Phase I of the project will include creating research profiles for over 5,000 faculty researchers from both institutions and Phase II of this project will add the remaining 15 North Carolina institutions and their 10,000 faculty researchers. Once implemented it will be the largest statewide research community of its kind. The web community created will have fully populated information on publications grant data and citations from over 15,000 researchers across all research disciplines.
"We did an exhaustive review of the options available to us," said Andy Johns, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "We built our own pre and post-award management system, and as such, were collecting a tremendous wealth of data. We were looking to leverage that data as well as publication data to better characterize researcher activity, identify skills, and facilitate collaboration. In the end, there was no combination of capability and coverage like the Collexis Expertise platform coupled with the Scopus repository. We feel like this will provide the best possible opportunity for our researchers to collaborate proactively."
"We are excited to be a part of this forward-looking project as it aligns with our goal of partnering with the research community to help highlight and share research expertise," said Jay Katzen, Managing Director of Academic & Government Products for Elsevier. "By tying in its repository with Scopus' broad and deep data and then overlaying it with Collexis' semantic technology, the University of North Carolina will be able to offer its scientists a new way to identify, monitor and leverage relevant research being conducted at the institution. The result will be greater collaboration within and across disciplines."
"The strength of combining the Collexis Expert Profiling solution with Scopus is obvious: a pre-populated statewide scientific social network with the objective to link the best brains together and attract researchers and science related business to North Carolina," said Christian Herzog, Managing Director of the Collexis STM business. "It uses a premier publication database in Scopus to constantly update the profiles. Without ever lifting a finger, each researcher will have a robust expertise profile that will continue to update as they write new scientific papers. The system is even suggesting potential collaborators based on the comparison of the expert profiles across all disciplines – implementing such a system will really change the scientific landscape"
The North Carolina community project just kicked off in February of this year, and the project is expected to complete the first major milestone in mid-summer for the Beta release to the North Carolina faculty.
About The University of North Carolina
The University of North Carolina is a public, multi-campus university dedicated to the service of North Carolina and its people. It encompasses 16 diverse university campuses, a residential high school for gifted students, and other educational, research, and public service organizations. Each shares in the overall mission of the University. That mission is to discover, create, transmit, and apply knowledge to address the needs of individuals and society. This mission is accomplished through instruction, which communicates the knowledge and values and imparts the skills necessary for individuals to lead responsible, productive, and personally satisfying lives; through research, scholarship, and creative activities, which advance knowledge and enhance the educational process; and through public service, which contributes to the solution of societal problems and enriches the quality of life in the State. In the fulfillment of this mission, the University shall seek an efficient use of available resources to ensure the highest quality in its service to the citizens of the State.
Teaching and learning constitute the primary service that the University renders to society. Teaching, or instruction, is the primary responsibility of each of the constituent institutions. The relative importance of research and public service, which enhance teaching and learning, varies among the constituent institutions, depending on their overall missions.
About Collexis Holdings, Inc.
Collexis Holdings, Inc., a leading developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software is headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina (USA) with operations in Cologne, Germany and Valparaiso, Chile. Collexis now offers the world's first pre-populated scientific social network for life science researchers, www.biomedexperts.com. Collexis' proprietary technology builds conceptual profiles of text, called Fingerprints, from documents, Websites, emails and other digitized content and matches them with a comprehensive list of pre-defined "fingerprinted" concepts to make research results more relevant and efficient. This matching of concepts eliminates the ambiguity and lack of priority associated with word searches. The results are often described as "finding needles in many haystacks." Through this novel approach, Collexis can build unique applications to search, index and aggregate information as well as prioritize, trend and predict data based on sources in multiple industries without the limitations of language or dialect. Collexis' current clients in the public, private and academic sectors include Johns Hopkins University; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the University of California, San Francisco; the University of South Carolina; Erasmus University Library; Lockheed Martin; the World Health Organization; Wellcome Trust; the National Institutes of Health; and the U.S. Department of Defense.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including the Lancet (www.thelancet.com) and Cell (www.cell.com), and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com), Scopus (www.scopus.com), Reaxys (www.reaxys.com), MD Consult (www.mdconsult.com) and Nursing Consult (www.nursingconsult.com), which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite (www.scival.com) and MEDai's Pinpoint Review (www.medai.com), which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.
A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier (www.elsevier.com) employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC (www.reedelsevier.com), a world-leading publisher and information provider. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).