RefWorks-COS Update Combines Potential Grants with Potential Researchers

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 08/24/11

A company with applications for managing research grant applications has integrated two of its products to streamline the process of identifying potential funding streams and matching them up with researchers. RefWorks-COS, which is a business unit of ProQuest, is combining COS Funding Opportunities with COS Scholar Universe to create COS Pivot Service. The funding program provides information about grant opportunities. The scholar program is a well-populated set of researcher profiles and indexed faculty Web pages. ProQuest runs a major research portal.

According to Jeff Baer, the company's vice-president and COS general manager, the new release is intended to build efficiency in the delivery of the research office's "primary services." "Research development officers are looking for ways to match funding to faculty to grow research activity at their institutions," said Baer. "COS Pivot provides tools for simultaneously expediting three key processes that support those goals: identifying faculty expertise, locating applicable funding opportunities, and promoting collaborations among researchers."

The heart of Pivot is the funding opportunity database. When it's mixed with material about specific researcher expertise and a thesaurus, the user can search for funding and also view matching collaborators from inside or outside the given institution.

Pivot also includes tools to manage those grants in the pre-award phase. Users can add internal deadlines to set timelines for doing submission work; they can track and prioritize funding opportunities; and they can save and organize their searches, monitor action steps, and get weekly updates on active projects.

Academic clients include Arizona State University, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and China's Tsinghua, among others.

More information is available at pivot.cos.com.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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