Already since 2012, Tijmen Altena and Paul Tuinenburg are working within the academic system as entrepreneurs. First as trainers and consultants, but since 2017 also with the software platform Impacter.
With Impacter, they learned a lot about using Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence in the context of grant proposals, but increasingly they started to use these technologies for other things than automating feedback on grant proposals.
First, we started a collaboration with ResearchConnect to use the matchmaking algorithms of Impacter to find the best funding opportunities in ResearchConnect. Not based on keywords, but based on project descriptions. And later, they started doing the same with the draft workprograms in Horizon Europe where these draft texts were matched against all the publications of researchers in a university. Only problem was, that the internal data of the university was needed because there wasn’t a good alternative available for academic publications. Working with the publication data, and providing matches to universities based on that data sparked the insight that this publication data could be very valuable as well for analyzing collaborations, finding project partners and much more. However, the data available, and the quality of that data wasn’t good enough to really get started on a new proposition.
Until January 3, 2022. That’s when OpenAlex beta launched their application. An index of over 250 million scholarly works, with extra coverage of the humanities (often lacking in proprietary databases), non-English languages (also lacking in many proprietary databases) and the Global South (again, very limited available in proprietary databases). This was interesting!
Soon, Impacter became one of the first in the world experimenting with this data, and the first implementation was actually with our partners of ResearchConnect. The publication data of OpenAlex, the funding data of ResearchConnect and the matchmaking magic of Impacter. For a few months, the idea was to integrate this all in Impacter, to not only provide automated feedback on grant proposals, but to also give suggestions for collaboration partners, based on publication data. However, soon the realization came that there were so many other use cases, that a new platform would make much more sense. This became Global Campus, the online place where you need to go when looking for academic expertise and knowledge.
And that is what currently is happening. Global Campus is used by investors to find experts for the technical due diligence. Used by researchers to find the best journal to publish in and to find collaboration partners. Used by non-academic staff in universities to scout internally and externally. Thanks to our collaboration with Academic Transfer, all university recruiters can use Global Campus to scout for international talent. Used by funders and publishers to find reviewers and many collaborations that use the API of Global Campus. And this is only the start! With the official launch in December 2022, Global Campus is still a young platform with lots of opportunities to grow!
So, if you are working for a funder or publisher and are responsible for the process of finding reviewers, please reach out. We are eager to get in touch and show you the magic of Global Campus!
Interested in learning more about Global Campus? Reach out and request a demo! https://globalcampus.ai/register-for-a-free-trial/
