Penn State Intercom......January 18 , 2001

Community of Science is a
valuable resource for faculty

Is your profile included in the Community of Science database?

"If you don't know what the Community of Science is, then your profile isn't listed," said Eva J. Pell, vice president for research and dean of The Graduate School. "And if it isn't listed, you are missing out on important opportunities."

The University subscribes to the Community of Science Inc. (also known as the Community of Scholars or COS) to help faculty locate funding sources and potential collaborators. In addition to its value to individual faculty, COS is one of the chief methods by which the Office of the Vice President for Research puts together interdisciplinary groups for joint funding proposals and responds to requests from industry.

COS is a series of linked databases including COS Expertise, a global registry of some 400,000 researchers in all disciplines at more than 1,300 universities, research institutions, agencies and corporations; and COS Funding Opportunities, which holds detailed information, updated daily, on more than 18,500 funding opportunities worth more than $30 billion.

Awards in the Funding Opportunities database include research grants; scholarships; postdoctoral awards; fellowships; support for visiting faculty; funding to attend or organize conferences, seminars and workshops; prizes and awards; equipment grants; facility access opportunities; funding for the arts; publishing support; and funding to develop programs to benefit the public or the environment.

The University's institutional subscription covers the use of these COS databases (as well as the Commerce Business Daily, the Federal Register, U.S. Patents and AGRICOLA) for all faculty and staff.

Through the COS Expertise database, researchers can identify peers and potential collaborators by searching on keywords within the Penn State Expertise database or worldwide; find Penn State alumni; find all awards by a certain company; find out who at the University has a current NSF grant (if all faculty are in the database); track current research (at Penn State or worldwide); and publicize research interests to corporations, foundations and government agencies.

At Penn State, the SIMS system is linked into COS, allowing a research administrator to click on the faculty name and immediately access a profile from COS if that faculty member is in the COS database. Currently, however, only half of Penn State's faculty members have submitted profiles, which limits the institutional value of the database.

For these reasons, the vice president's office strongly recommends that all faculty members submit an expert profile to the COS Expertise database and update it yearly.

To assist them, Research Publications has prepared a COS Resource Page (check the Web at
http://www.research.psu.edu/cos/) that includes step-by-step guidelines on how to create or update a COS Expertise profile, how to search for profiles of other Penn State faculty, how to search for funding opportunities and how to use the automated COS Funding Alert service, as well as links to the Community of Science's own Web pages.

For more information on COS at Penn State, call Nancy Marie Brown, director of Research Publications and Policy, at (814) 865-3477 or e-mail nmb1@psu.edu.

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