VIVO is used at more than 150 institutions in more than 25 countries world wide, representing hundreds of thousands of scholars and millions of scholarly works.  A common use of VIVO is as an "expert finder" helping faculty, students, and others find scholars at institutions. See a complete list of registered users here.

The VIVO open source platform is available for free to anyone and can be downloaded from GitHub. The code is currently licensed under the Apache-2 open source license. This means that any organization can use, modify, and even integrate the code into their commercial application without paying any licensing fees. Of course, we hope if you improve upon the software, you will contribute that code back to the community for everyone's benefit. Today there are more than two dozen contributors around the world contributing code, bug fixes, etc.  VIVO software is managed by a smaller group of volunteer developers (called committers) that work together to plan releases and integrate new features and bug fixes submitted by the community.

VIVO can be customized in many ways to suit your needs:

Customize or theme the user interface - You can fully customize the look and feel of your VIVO so it will integrate seamlessly with your own institution's website and can be more intuitive for your users. VIVO provides various "themes" out of the box.  You can create your own theme by customizing the Freemarker templates provided with VIVO

Customize the metadata - VIVO uses the VIVO Ontology to represent scholarship as RDF. You can extend the ontology to represent new types of scholarship, new activities, and activites that may be unique to your institution.

Configure Browse and Search - You can decide what fields you would like to display for browsing, and search on your VIVO. You can also select any elements you wish from the ontology for display in the search interface. All of the text within a given item and metadata associated with an item, are indexed for full text search.

Local authentication mechanisms - VIVO supports most university authentication methods.  In addition, VIVO comes with its own internal authentication method, and can be configured to use multiple authentication methods at once. You can also build your own authentication plugin as needed.

Standards compatiblility - VIVO complies with many standard protocols for access, ingest, and export.  The standards VIVO supports include: DCterms, BIBO, OCLC, ORCiD, BFO, Vcard, Rest, Triple Pattern Fragments, and many others.

Configurable databases and triple stores -You can choose MYSQL, other other relational database using Jena TDB or SDB, as well as popular triple stores such as Virtuoso, StarDog, AllegroGraph, and Neptune.

Default language -The VIVO web application is internationalized. You can select the language which VIVO uses.

VIVO  is used by higher education institutions for whom the platform was initially developed, while also showing a much broader appeal. VIVO has been used by research organizations,  government agencies, state and national Libraries, and consortiums to represent their scholars, their works, and their activities. For a complete list of all registered users please visit here.

VIVO is easily installed by a system administrator on a Linux, MacOS or Windows machine. If you'd like to try out VIVO before installing, visit OpenVIVO, a VIVO anyone can use.  A full list of software prerequsities can be found in our Documentation.

VIVO can represent scholars and their activities and accomplishments using the VIVO ontology.  Using the ontology, VIVO represents, people, contact information, organizations, structure, positions held, teaching, research, and service.  Scholarly works can be linked to artifacts for direct access from a person's profile.

VIVO represents scholarship using RDF, the W3C standard for creating linked open data.  Using linked open data, your VIVO can easily provide its data to others, creating a distributed open network regarding scholarship.