NDSU faculty, staff and students who use COS, formerly Community of Science, must soon make the transition from COS to its new, improved rendition called “Pivot.” COS has been used by the NDSU community during the past decade to conduct customized grant searches and receive email alerts about upcoming grants in their fields. COS also hosts a database of faculty profiles, called COS Expertise. COS can be used for all disciplines, not only the sciences. It also is used for all types of scholarly activity, in addition to research.

Pivot automatically pre-populates faculty expertise profiles, taking information from professional journals, websites and other trusted online sources, making it no longer necessary for faculty to update their own information. Also, Pivot creates grant searches, available with one click once the user logs in to their account. Faculty, staff and students may still create their own searches and customize profiles as needed.

Although both COS (www.cos.com) and Pivot (http://Pivot.cos.com) are now available to NDSU users, eventually COS will be discontinued as the transition is made to Pivot. NDSU has a renewed subscription to COS Pivot for the next three years. Previous COS users can use their cos.com usernames and passwords to access Pivot.

Because NDSU's IP addresses are recognized by Pivot, one can start searching for funding or faculty profiles immediately. If you have a COS username and password, there is no need to create a new one. If you do not have a username and password, you can create one. A username and password are necessary when a user is off-campus, or when a user wants to save a funding record or funding search.

If you haven’t been a COS user, get started now with Pivot. To create a Pivot account, go to http://pivot.cos.com and click the “Sign up” option in the upper right of the screen. Faculty, staff and students can gain access to Pivot by indicating your affiliation with NDSU.

Training is available online at your own desktop. A newly created COS Pivot YouTube channel can be accessed at http://youtube.com/proquestpivot. Both live and recorded webinars are available at www.refworks-cos.com/training. Contact kay.sizer@ndsu.edu for more information or assistance.