“What we’re seeing today is fairly dramatic and there is a sea change happening with open access publishing and the large publishers.”
Ahead of ESOF 2014, we talk to three leading figures in science, technology and academia who through frustrations of not having the effective tools necessary to do their work, decided to build their own.
In this three-part series in the run-up to Europe’s largest, general science meeting held every two years, this year in Copenhagen (June 21-26), we look at the increasing number of start-up companies that are “spinning out” of academic institutions worldwide.
Here, the founder of Brainspace, Dave Copps talks about how social platforms are changing the way in which scientists work and how technology is being used to advance open research.
Dave’s background:
Dave is a social scientist and serial entrepreneur that has founded and launched three companies focused on scalable semantic discovery. He is currently CEO of Brainspace Corporation where he is leading the creation of BrainspaceScience, the first global semantic network for science professionals. BrainspaceScience transforms the published works of scientists all over the world into a collective intelligence that can be used by science professionals everywhere to semantically connect to relevant people and knowledge.
Where did the idea for Brainspace originate from?
I’ve always been a bit of a search geek and enjoyed discovery systems, but also often quite frustrated by them. Over time as the volumes of data are getting increasingly bigger, the systems that we have are equally becoming less and less effective.
I read a report recently that the success rate of an internet search is 50% and that the improvement over the last ten years has been 0%. This is a result of both just evolutionary improvement in search technology and an exponential increase in the amount of data being produced.