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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Polaris (Easy open access dissemination for research institutions)

Teaser

Through this feasibility study, MyScienceWork has identified specific needs that were not addressed by Polaris - its turnkey repository solution for research organizations and has redesigned its pricing model to allow more flexibility and better serve its customers. Polaris is...

Summary

Through this feasibility study, MyScienceWork has identified specific needs that were not addressed by Polaris - its turnkey repository solution for research organizations and has redesigned its pricing model to allow more flexibility and better serve its customers. Polaris is the easiest way for research organizations to implement an institutional repository to dissemination its research output and profile of its researchers. Open Access is of great importance to advance research, knowledge and technology, to foster a knowledge society and foster scientific collaborations within academia and with other stakeholders among industry, other disciplines and countries and with the public.

Identified needs common among customer targets are to have dashboards and metrics that allow senior administrators to better understand and analyze their research activities and its evolution and impact.

As a consequence, MyScienceWork has designed and beta-tested a new service with on-demand science metrics and dashboards based on text-mining of research publications and relations between authors, within an institutions or with other organizations.

The new science metrics service has been presented to the interviewed customers as a result of the study. Further market research is being conducted on this specific service and we are discussing first pilots with priority segment partners.

A shorter survey has been conducted to evaluate the commercial potential of an open access and communication toolkit to be integrated into a EU proposal. Satisfying results were obtained with many stakeholders expressing interest in the service. Further feedback will be received when these groups will submitted their proposal using the toolkit and when / if the proposals are successful in receiving fundings.

Work performed

Overview of the work done and the results

In this feasibility study, MSW has investigated the product / market fit of its Polaris service for the following three key segments :
Research foundations;
Research institutions (such as universities and laboratories);
Large consortia or virtual researcher centers.

After performing interviews with key stakeholders from identified targets, we were able to update market requirements, identify pains, gains.
Updating the added value canvas of our services allowed us to the develop additional services serving specifically the key stakeholders, meaning the buyer (senior university administrators, directors of organizations, founders). These new services are for example customized strategic metrics and on-demand dashboards integrated into Polaris or provided independently.
On top of that, the more detailed customer scenario allowed us to redesign our pricing structure into optional modules and to integrate project management and implementation services to increase customer satisfaction and share MSW’s experience in implementing platforms for institutions.

Additional Market Requirement: the MSW Big Data Service

♣ Additional market requirements for each segment
Research foundations

Market requirements
Pains
Gains
Customer Jobs
Comments
Increasing visibility
- simultaneous communicate to researchers and the general public
- have researchers to communicate properly on their project
- use analytics and text-analysis to identify material for marketing and communication (trends, top publications, top authors)
- quantify the impact of funded research
- content adapted to social media
- data-based marketing
Here MSW’s approach, at the intersection of science communication and science metrics, answer well this need
Mapping research activities
- Difficulties to track publications after the end of a project
- Not all funded publications mention the funders
- Evaluate researchers and research projects
- Identify experts in specific fields
- Find previous grantee and track their career

Provide additional data for funders to evaluate a candidate or a project
Here MSW’s approach, at the intersection of science networking and global platform, answer well this need
Reporting, Monitoring, Science Metrics
- science-metrics providers are not exhaustive (they don’t aggregate all content)
- providers make choice and calculation without sharing them openly
- Provide normalized metrics across institutions funded (one centralized reporting system)
- Increase efficiency of the most impactful research
- Integrate patents as a relevant science metric
Provide insights into their research to all stakeholders
MSW will need to build its own citation map if it wants to compete with Thomson Reuters and Scopus

Research institutions (such as universities and laboratories);

Market requirements
Pains
Gains
Customer Jobs
Comments
Comply to Open Access
- researchers won’t easily comply to the burden of reporting all their publications
- Automatic prefilling of lists of publications
- facilitate reporting tasks for researchers and institutions admins
- monitor compliance to OA policy
- Deposit all research publications, with proper metadata
- Incentivise researchers to comply to open access
Research needs tools with great user experience. Their should not be a huge gap between professional and everyday life’s tools
Centralize publications
- have difficulties aggregating their research output through all the conferences and publishers where their research publish
- provide links to all research outputs available
- disambiguate authors and publications with minimum effort
- provide access to PDFs
- provide access to all research output
MSW can use its 60M publications to find the institution\'s’ output across all sources
Increasing visibility
- provide easy access to all their research
- provide access to PDF through institutional repositories
- use raw research to communicate to the public
- use analytics and text-analysis to identify material for marketing and communication (trends, top publications, top authors)
- content adapted to social media
- data-based marketing
Here MSW’s approach, at the intersection of science communication and science metrics, answer well this need
Mapping of research activities

- Evaluate collaborations and departments
- Help scientists identify collaborators and find expertise
- help institutions under their research activities

- communicate, evaluate, analyze
Here MSW’s approach, at the intersection of science networking and global platform, answer well this need
Reporting, Monitoring, Science Metrics
- science-metrics providers are not exhaustive (they don’t aggregate all content)
- providers make choice and calculation without sharing them openly
- Provide metrics to help strategic decision making (what to fund, who to fund)
- Compare institutions with their competitors to help them evolve
- Increase efficiency of the most impactful research
- Integrate patents as a relevant science metric
Provide insights into their research to all stakeholders
MSW will need to build its own citation map if it wants to compete with Thomson Reuters and Scopus

Large consortia or virtual research centres.

Market requirements
Pains
Gains
Customer Jobs
Comments
Mapping research activities
- difficulties to know who does what

- visualize collaborations, projects and expertise
Efficiently manage very large research teams

Collaboration
- sharing data
- archiving: lineage is lost (data is lost) when someone leaves the collaborations
- team members are far, virtual labs
- useful online collaboration via discussion forums

Following interviews with Researchers and Research Institutions, several issues/challenges are now appearing for research institutes that MyScienceWork addresses with the Polaris solution:
Promotion of open access: in order to comply with the EC’s and other open access policies, research institutions need to provide their researchers with the means to share their research freely. Archiving published research in a repository can be the least expensive way to comply to open access policies, reduce the time to access new research and to increase its impact.
Increasing visibility: openly disseminating the output of research increases visibility of the researchers and their institutions, and increases metrics such as citations and international ranking, and attracts funding, projects and collaboration opportunities. Today this is a great concern for research institutions to be competitive regarding obtaining funds and grants, attracting skillful students and researchers, the media attention and to compete with fast growing new scientific players in developing countries.
Fostering global collaboration: online research collaboration is still a strong challenge for institutions. We provide features to help researchers market themselves to industry (to attract funding or to find an employer) and to help academics better communicate and network, to share and promote their research, and to collaborate in private groups and keep up to date with the latest research.
Centralization of publications: most of the research institutes get high difficulties to centralize the publications of their researchers in one single institutional repository, mainly due to:
Researchers load their publications in just one open access repository that most of the time is relevant for them regarding the discipline they cover – e.g.: Arxiv for Physics and Math – and not the one of their research institution.
Researchers upload their publications in the open access repository that offers the easiest tool to do it and it is not necessarily the one of their research institution.
Polaris is able to automate the largest part of the upload task through different tools and so allow a significant time saving for research institution and researchers:
Pdf Parser: Researchers can upload their publications in Polaris in 2 minutes thanks to the prefiling of metadata fields
Indexed resources: with more than 2,500 databases indexed in the MyScienceWork database (60 million articles), Polaris is able to identify automatically the publications linked to a researcher or an institution (laboratory, project…)

Additional features to leverage Polaris’ unique added value and integrate more deeply into the needs of the customers have been identified as well:

Mapping of the research activities: Most of the Research Institutes website do not present a whole and clear overview of its research outputs. The most common issue is the link between researchers, projects and publications.

Polaris is able to link researchers that work on the same project and their publications. The user experience is the heart of Polaris solution and the link between researchers, projects and publications gives more visibility, discoverability and understandability to the whole research activities.

Statistical reports: Impact measurement of the research activities is currently a real challenge for Research Institutions because of:
Budget cuts: need to better split the budget with the measurement of the impact of every research projects
Research & Innovation: knowing the research discipline that are trendy can help to obtain budget, recruit the right researchers team (competencies…) …
Cooperation: regarding the expertise of Research Institutes, initiate the right cooperation for project
Reporting: when the academic laboratories are evaluated by National Research Agency, they have to provide figures

♣ Some examples of reference customers for first implementations of the Polaris platform => At least 1 customer for each segment.
Research Foundation:

Case study LBMCC: The LBMCC needs a web platform to enhance the visibility of its research activities and outputs. With Polaris, LBMCC stores all their publications, build their network and communicate with popularized article and video interview of researchers involved in their research project to address a message to the largest community linked to their research activities.
Polaris is also a solution use by the LBMCC for the crowdfunding or their research activities.

Case study AXA Research Fund: AXA Research Fund is a long term partner of MSW. For several years, we have provided them with science communication services and consulting (popular science articles writing, videos, social media communication campaigns etc.).
A need has been identified to provide the foundation with a mapping tool to analyze the funded projects, identify the resulted scientific outcome and the impact of the funding on the short and the long term. AXA Research Fund has a special desire to follow and provide assistance to the researcher all along his / her career and adapt its activity to the different stages of a scientific career.

Research institute:

Case study COMUE USPC: The cluster Exact Sciences and Technologies of the University Sorbonne Paris Cité (USPC) encounter real issue to identify the mapping of the global research activities. The main goal of Polaris defined by USPC is to give internally a clear overview of the whole and detailed research activities in order to connect researchers of USPC and create new collaboration research project. Polaris offers several items to reach this objective:
Centralization of publications
Linking publications to Laboratories
Linking publications to researchers
Mapping between publications, projects and researchers
Working on the profiling of the researcher
Creating private chat group per project

Large consortia:

Case study Luxembourg Project: An identified project is to provide the luxembourgish research ecosystem with an infrastructure to promote individual research centers and universities with a customized reporting and dissemination repository, as well as an overall infrastructure that will allow better transparency and reporting across disciplines and type of organizations.

♣ Investigate IP protection of the Polaris platform (in particular of the pre-fill feature) and legal compliance measures in each market segment => Preliminary reports on freedom to operate for each market segment
Copyright restrictions for the dissemination of published articles is a technical risk.
Questions about IP Protection:
What kind of information MSW can gather on the web and pre-fill in Polaris regarding researchers’ profile? What is private data and public data? Different IP Policy per country?

MyScienceWork as a proponent of open access and partner of both open access and non-OA publishers has an expertise that allows it to help institutions decide on a policy that will help institutions and funders over copyright issues.

Technical solutions have also been implemented to monitor the type of content that is being uploaded to the solutions.

MSW is part of the major working groups where publishers and platforms develop standardized, machine-readable copyrights licences integrated in the articles’ PDFs.

How can we use data text-mined from publications of the MSW Database or from others open access database (e.g.: Arxiv, PubMed…)?

Text-mining copyrights imposed by some publishers can sometime be pretty restrictive, for scientific purpose as well as commercial applications. This question has to be addressed in more details in its entire scope and with legal advice.

How can we use data of the publication uploaded by researcher as author?
Two scenarios have to be distinguished here. If the users uploads a publication on a Polaris institutional platform. Does the institution has an open access and text-mining policy?
Communication ToolKit for H2020
MSW has collected evidence about the market fit for its “open access and science communication toolkit” targeted at EU grant proposals through a communication campaign and interviews of some customers.
The purpose of this kit is to offer tools to successfully comply to the requirements in the impact section of a EU proposal. The MSW team offers to join consortia at the proposal stage, to help with work packages dedicated to Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation of project results and provide efficient dissemination and open access plans.
In case of success, the MSW team implements a strategy to provide online visibility to the project and the consortium, a Polaris repository for all research output to be shared in open access, consulting to comply to open access guidelines and will implement a professional communication strategy to share and communicate research and project results to a very large audience of students, science enthusiasts, industry and the general public.
The toolkit was designed and disseminate by MSW and ZAZ Ventures. The strategy to analyze the market fit for this toolkit was to publish a blog post on Linkedin, disseminated by ZAZ Ventures to its network and collect requests for the toolkit and analyze the need.
Results:
The blog post received 49 likes and was shared 24 times. It led to 47 requests for a toolkit from more than 10 countries, mainly EU project officers from universities all around Europe.
Following interviews and analysis of those requests, we estimate that around 25 contacts will integrate the toolkit in their proposal. We should have answers about the success rate coming starting from Q1 2017 to Q4.

Final results

After interviewing and analyze answers from customers in all our target market, we prioritized our customer segments, designed new feature to reinforce our added-value and designed a roadmap on the long and short term to optimize short term revenue and long term added value services for the customers.

Updates in added value proposition and pitches:
Research foundations
Help them to identify the impact of the research project they funded with the following actions:
Centralize publications: Gather the publications produced thanks to their fund
Increase visibility: Give them tools to identify potential project between academic and corporate market
Measure impact of the projects they funded : statistical reports and metrics
Retrieve researchers they’ve founded in the past and build the storyline of those former granteed:

Research institutions (such as universities and laboratories);
Help them to:
Centralize publications: Automate the centralization of their research activities and outputs
Map their global research activities (publications, projects, profiles) to enhance their visibility (Internally and externally)
Evaluate the impact of their research providing them with the metrics needed

Large consortia or virtual research centres.

Help them to:
Build several levels of Polaris to give either a global overview of their complex organization and enhance the visibility of every university/school/laboratory of the consortia
Provide global metrics and specific metrics per institute of the consortia
Build up communities at different level: global, institution level and across institutions depending of research projects

Changes in the pricing structure
Services such as project management, need identification, technical description of the product, training, implementation etc. are one key elements where we can leverage our service, provide a better results and stronger relationship with the customers while generating short term revenue based on the knowledge and skills of our management and R&D team.
Implementation of such projects for academic institutions are indeed challenging. Coordinators are dealing with very complex structure and decision making process, where communication between stakeholders like technologists, librarians, researchers and senior administrator of research can belong to different spheres and uses different vocabularies.
As explained above, we also decided to break our pricing structure into optional modules, to be purchased together or independently to optimize flexibility and revenue on the short term, accordingly to needs and target.
Our new modules lies in 3 categories:
Services (project management, training, implementation)
R&D (customization, automation of prefiling of repository, on-demand metrics)
Features from Polaris or independant dashboards (event management, search tools, profiles)

New services : MSW Big Data and Text-Mining
Across all targets we identified a need for analyzes of research output to generate better understand and science metrics for decision-makers, founders etc.

This led to the development of a new service dedicated to this, that can be integrated within Polaris or that can be independant. See the infographics below for more information:

Open Access toolkit
The conclusion of this action (one Linkedin post, leading to 47 requests, 20 proposals integration) is very satisfying. The interest for EU project and program managers to integrate a partner that provides a toolkit to the dissemination and open access requirements of the impact section is confirmed.

Further developments of this study
The next 3 to 6 months have been put into a roadmap and prioritized according to the results of the study.
The new services designed are presently being presented to the targeted audiences. Access to a network of individuals and organizations willing to provide feedback and to try new services would fasten the process of validating again those new services.