Few industries center more around reputation than academia. But in an industry with a mantra “publish or perish” securing reputation means passing through one very important class of gatekeeper: the academic journals. For all the progress made building reputation systems online, little has changed in the ivory tower.
“There hasn’t been any innovation in hundreds of years,” said Ijad Madisch, CEO of ResearchGate, speaking of academic publishing.
That’s what he hopes to change.
Though Madisch came to Boston to found the company, it is now based in Berlin. However, he was back in town a couple weeks ago and gave me an update on the company’s progress since we last covered its Series B in February.
What started as a Q&A site for scientists, ResearchGate today hopes to function as a publishing platform for scientific researchers, and as an alternative measure of reputation in that community.
That vision includes more open publication of data. Whereas academic journals tend to be interested more in novel results rather than publishing raw data, ResearchGate hopes to be able to do both. And just as you might subscribe to someone in your field on Quora, ResearchGate allows researchers to follow one another’s activities as well as to collaborate.
One of the success stories Madisch cites is Nicole Forster, a cancer researcher at Mass. General. At a pivotal point in her postdoctoral fellowship, Forster solicited advice from the ResearchGate community as to how to isolate the Ribonucleic acid from mouse mammary gland cells. Within 24-hours she had an answer that worked and allowed her to move forward with her experiments.
The site has grown to 1.8 million users and, perhaps not surprisingly, skews toward younger academics. The average age for users is 27, with younger researchers more active in asking questions and older ones treating it more as an alternative resume.
The company does not yet have any revenue and remains focused on building the most compelling product it can for its users.
Madisch came to Boston to found the company based on feedback from professors here and because of its world class status in science. A professor in Berlin discouraged him from starting a company, while one in Cambridge (where he’d lived previously) not only encouraged him but also invested.
And yet, ultimately, Madisch found Berlin more attractive for developer talent while also realizing that the academic community in Boston was harder to penetrate than he’d hoped. Even with Boston’s entrepreneurial culture, research groups were reticent to let in an entrepreneur looking to pitch them on a product.
And that, ultimately, points to the size of the challenge ResearchGate faces. Accelerating the speed and efficiency of scientific research is an incredibly compelling end game. But the academic and research communities, though incredibly competitive, aren’t known for their embrace of change, at least in a professional context.
Madisch is betting that they’ll make an exception to buck the grasp of the journals. Hearing him talk about his vision for how science could be done collaboratively on the web, it’s hard not to root for ResearchGate to succeed by its own grand standards.
“Success for me is if ResearchGate wins the Nobel Prize,” said Madisch.
