Phases II and III of FASIS development include the incorporation of faculty data on scholarly and artistic accomplishments (research, publications, grants, patents, professional affiliations, and service). These data form the basis of the annual activity reports that all Schools require of their faculty, as part of the annual review and evaluation process.

The original proposal for FASIS was to have the Schools continue to collect these data, and feed them into FASIS over time. However, collection is presently a somewhat uneven process; a few Schools have access to home-grown programs into which data are fed and accessed locally or through the web. Other Schools have no means to collect faculty activity data electronically, except in the form of pdf files. There is no access to this range of faculty activity data at the central
University level, severely limiting the types of institutional analyses that
can be performed.

During the course of Phase I, FASIS project staff and sponsors became aware of SciVal Experts (formerly Collexis) and were impressed by the functionality it offered and by Elsevier's commitment to its continuous improvement. SciVal Experts offers a means to provide ready access to faculty publication, grant, and other data in a much more comprehensive yet much less labor-intensive process. These data will be available to Schools and central administrative units alike.

VIVO, open-source software developed at Cornell University, provides complementary functionality to SciVal Experts. VIVO development is now part of an interdisciplinary national network funded by a 2-year NIH grant. The goal of VIVO is to facilitate the discovery of researchers and collaborators across the country.

SciVal Experts and VIVO are "research networking tools," comprehensive knowledge management systems to compile data on faculty members' research and scholarly expertise into searchable, networked profiles that can then be used to facilitate new collaborations. SciVal Experts collects publication and research information in an automated way, from verifiable sources, without requiring individual faculty input. Quality assurance and quality control are provided by SciVal staff members. VIVO has been incorporated into SciVal Experts for storage and additional networking. These tools will be efficiently and easily used to:

· Gather references and accompanying data on publications and existing or potential
collaborations for individual faculty or whole departments, using automated, quality assured algorithms, all with a minimal impact on faculty members.
· View comprehensive metrics and analytics on publications and collaborations for
individual faculty or whole departments. This may assist in Program Review and other analysis of faculty productivity and interactions.
· Extract collaboration data for proposals and reports without querying the faculty
themselves.
· Search for faculty members as research advisors or mentors (used by both undergraduate and graduate students).
· Assist new faculty to find colleagues or collaborators at Northwestern and elsewhere.
· Serve as a point of data collection, data storage, analytics, reporting, and a source of data to feed to other systems (Enterprise, School, Library, etc.) or web sites on campus.
· Provide a research network for communities of faculty members, for example within the Chicago Biomedical Consortium or across Illinois or the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).
· Provide a secure HelpDesk to assist faculty in updating their own profiles,
particularly in areas not covered by Scopus or PubMed - the sources of publication data for SciVal Experts.
· Only publically available information is stored or displayed through the SciVal
Experts interface.

In most of the humanities, the arts, and many areas of social sciences, communications, and journalism, the definition of scholarly and artistic accomplishments extends beyond publications and grants. The incorporation of these data is a challenge for the Schools, for FASIS, and for any tool being used to complement FASIS. We understand that we will need to find other ways to meet the needs of these disciplines. This might be done through using the University Library or other external sources to capture data. That said, SciVal Experts is configurable to allow for the storage of these data with customized descriptors. With respect to SciVal Experts, any publications that are relevant to these areas that are available in Elsevier-Scopus or PubMed will be automatically included. However, much of the data will need to be entered by faculty or their proxies but can then be stored and presented within SciVal Experts. Using these methods, several peer institutions are expanding their Expert Profiles installations across disciplines.

SciVal Experts can also store data on patents, affiliations, and space utilization and can collect and display CVs. The intention is to pull these additional data from Northwestern Enterprise sources, local (School) information management systems, and publically available web resources. The rich information in SciVal Experts will be repurposed and shared with FASIS and other institutional web pages and data consumers, including those within the local, national and international Expert Profiles networks, reducing the cost and increasing efficiencies across Northwestern. Private or sensitive information will not be imported into the SciVal Experts database.
 
As part of FASIS we expect SciVal Experts to be used internally by individual faculty and researchers, students at all levels; librarians; research, grant, and funding administrators; deans; department chairs; Office of the Provost and Office for Institutional Research; development staff; and administrative assistants. We also expect SciVal Experts to be a valuable link for those external to Northwestern: research communities, particularly in the Chicago area; external collaboration seekers; funding agencies; research foundations; potential students; donors and potential donors; and the general public.

The SciVal Experts interface is expected to be easily and frequently used by Northwestern faculty members; it is likely to become their entry point to the Northwestern Portal.

To see how SciVal Experts is being used at some peer institutions, please visit http://www.info.scival.com/experts/customerlist.