Time to end era of lost academic talks, says edtech founder

A new platform to run and publish academic seminars will help researchers access early stage findings without relying on preprints or requests to see unpublished papers, its co-founder has explained.

While hundreds of thousands of academic seminars have been held online during the pandemic, sharing the content of these events was cumbersome, with scholars or organisers usually required to email slides or PDFs of research to participants upon request, said Ben Kaube. With Mendeley founder Jan Reichelt and Andrew Preston, founder of peer review tracking service Publons, Dr Kaube has launched Cassyni to tackle what they call “a previously underserved problem in research”.

“Everything gets done via the distribution of PDFs which is quite old school – we are trying to help academics to access the videos that they have been watching at a seminar,” said Dr Kaube, a former academic researcher turned edtech entrepreneur, whose start-up Kopernio (now EndNote Click), founded with Dr Reichelt, was sold to Clarivate Analytics in 2018 for £3.5 million.

Regarded as one of the UK’s most successful edtech companies, Mendeley, which is used by researchers to discover, share and annotate research papers, was sold to Elsevier in 2013 for a reported £65 million four years after its launch, while Publons was sold to Clarivate in 2017.

As well as providing a platform for online events, Cassyni will capture events held on Zoom, providing a searchable transcript of proceedings or slides for delegates, which will also allow participants to replay relevant sections of a scholar’s talk without viewing the entire event.

“There are millions of these events happening each year but there is no way to capture what is being said, or cite a speaker from a seminar,” said Dr Kaube, who said that the platform’s search function aimed to “recreate the non-linear way that academics work”.

Dr Kaube said he hoped that the platform would be “complementary” to preprints or journal articles themselves, which have been the traditional way in which scholars share important new findings.

“As a researcher, sometimes you want to go deep into a 30-page manuscript but a 30-minute talk might also be a better way of consuming the same content, so we’re keen to increase the visibility of these talks,” he said, adding that Cassyni would also allow presenters to become “easily citable” via digital identifiers, providing an “additional and faster way to get cited”.

The rolling nature of seminars, often held weekly or monthly, also meant that visibility was important because the platform may help to publicise interesting talks, thereby building an audience for future events, he added.

“Unlike conferences there isn’t the same pressure for everyone to talk or comment on a particular day – people can go at their own pace and can come back with questions or comments in future events,” said Dr Kaube.

Cassyni will operate on a similar “freemium” business model to Mendeley, with delegates able to access its searchable functions for free and host institutions paying a subscription.

“Universities and organisations are spending many hours organising these events, so we believe it would be a worthwhile investment,” said Dr Kaube.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com