THE FIRST ACADEMIC SOCIAL NETWORK CREATOR THAT EMPOWERS RESEARCHERS TO COLLABORATE, CONTROL PRIVACY AND INCREASE THEIR IMPACT

Descrizione del progetto

Una piattaforma collaborativa sta cambiando l’ecosistema accademico

Gli editori tradizionali e i loro processi centralizzati continuano a confermarsi il modo più diffuso per certificare e divulgare le conoscenze accademiche. Nel tentativo di fornire soluzioni alternative a un processo ambiguo e inefficiente, sono comparse alcune nuove piattaforme digitali. Tuttavia, queste ultime hanno incontrato resistenza poiché molte di esse utilizzano modelli di servizio dell’«economia delle piattaforme», il che implica governance centralizzata e un esercizio sleale del potere, tra altri problemi. Per affrontare tale questione, il progetto UNIFIED SCIENCE, finanziato dall’UE, sta valutando la fattibilità dell’introduzione di una piattaforma basata su un sistema di credito reciproco, alimentato dalla tecnologia del registro distribuito, che agevolerà lo scambio di conoscenze scientifiche nel mondo accademico e della ricerca. Il progetto si dedicherà inoltre all’analisi delle possibilità di adozione di un sistema decentralizzato di gestione dei dati personali.

Obiettivo

The EU has made multi-billion Euro investments to increase its innovation potential by subsidising the collaboration between academics and industry but the R&D expenditure per GDP is still as low as 2.1%, far behind the US and Asia, as well as below the EUs long standing target of 3%. Compared to the US, the EUs academics in all fields show 25% less collaborations and collaborations with industry are only 50% of the US indexing. Without a doubt, academics are highly interested in collaborating since this directly correlates to their scientific impact. The main obstacle today is the lack of IT solutions to efficiently connect academics. Current platforms such as ResearchGate, LinkedIn and others have failed to address major customer needs such as secure external collaborations, privacy and relevant engagement. Social networks are advertisement driven and scientific discussions only account for less than 8% of all engagement while professional collaborations that lead to new research are practically non-existent. Our solution is UNIFIED SCIENCE, an academic social network creator that provides a stand-alone, decentralised and secure social network to universities or R&D institutions and significantly improves their collaboration capacity. The network is deployed with a web & mobile App, incorporating unique features such as decentralised technology for privacy, DeepLinks for secure collaborations, MePass for dynamic user permissions and API widgets for access to online publishing platforms. UNIFIED SCIENCEs prototype has already been tested in 11 pilot studies, attracted 11 paying customers and 15+ interested customers. After completion of the Phase 1 & 2 developments, UNIFIED SCIENCE will enter the €160bn IT segment of the global R&D market. Through our extensive industry contacts and academic affiliations, we will deploy UNIFIED SCIENCE globally, starting in the EU, with expected accumulated profits of €9.3m 6 new jobs and an ROI of 9.3 within 3 years.