Digital Science Announces New Catalyst Grant Winners
Research industry technology company Digital Science has today revealed the latest winners of its prestigious Catalyst Grant award: Paper Digest, Cadmore Media and ConfRef.org have each been awarded a grant.
An international initiative to develop innovative projects and technologies The Catalyst Grant offers an award of up to £25,000 or $30,000 for concepts with the potential to transform scientific and academic research. Digital Science is well known for its engagement with the research community, and the grant supports ideas at an early stage of development, without the need for a complete business or development plan.
- Cadmore Media – UK / US
A platform which enables scientific organisations to publish scholarly, professional and technical information through streaming video and audio.
- ConfRef.org – Germany
A one-stop pan publisher place for scientists and research evaluators to find information about conferences and to reliably reference conferences via a globally unique persistent ID.
- Paper Digest – Tokyo, Japan
Paper Digest is a tool which uses artificial intelligence to generate an easy-to-read summary of academic papers.
Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science said: “Twice a year we open the Catalyst Grant to applications from all over the world – and each year the number of entries continues to grow. The people best positioned to define areas for innovation are researchers themselves – but it’s incredibly hard for those with an idea to secure early-stage funding – finding investors who understand the research market is a challenge, meaning many potentially successful ideas remain just that, ‘ideas’. That’s exactly why we created the Catalyst Grant – our financial support, alongside our advice makes a real difference.”
Cadmore Media
Cadmore Media’s platform will enable scientific organisations to publish scholarly, professional and technical information through streaming video and audio. The platform aims to transform media assets into well-identified and tagged digital objects that can be fully integrated within the scholarly communication ecosystem (and beyond).
Cadmore Media was co-founded by CEO Violaine Iglesias, based in Washington D.C. and Simon Inger, based in Oxfordshire, UK. Both Iglesias and Inger have extensive experience working in the scholarly publishing and information space.
Violaine Iglesias, CEO & Co-founder of Cadmore Media, said: “Although English is the language of science, it is not the first language of the majority of scientists. Making video and podcasts accessible to all via extended metadata and transcripts opens up high-quality research outputs to the whole world.”
Simon Inger, Cadmore’s Co-founder, said: “Digital Science has a great reputation to put researchers at the heart of its work. We are thrilled that they are supporting our project and Cadmore’s mission, which will further enfranchise the research community.”
ConfRef.org
Conferences play a key role in the dissemination of scientific results, yet lack proper identification and integration in the research lifecycle. ConfRef.org will gather data about conferences from proceedings publishers, conference organisers and other sources. The tool aims to be a place where scientists and research evaluators can find information about conferences and reference conferences via a globally unique persistent ID.
ConfRef.org was founded by Aliaksandr (Alex) Birukou, an executive editor of computer science at Springer Nature, Kai Eckert, a professor at Stuttgart Media University, and Andrey Gromyko, a business developer and project manager at web marketing agency, Net Wise.
Kai Eckert, who runs the project at Stuttgart Media University said: “We are happy to receive this grant from Digital Science and looking forward to building the first version of the register of scientific conferences. We hope to launch ConfRef as the place for authors, reviewers, funders to go to learn more about the conference in computer science and related disciplines. With Aliaksandr Birukou and Andrey Gromyko in the project management board, we are building on the successes of the Crossref/DataCite group on PIDs for conferences (https://www.crossref.org/working-groups/conferences-projects/) and Springer Linked Open Data pilot.”
Paper Digest
Paper Digest is the brainchild of two graduates from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who specialise in bibliometrics. Dr Yasutomo Takano and Dr Cristian Mejia, who are joined by strategic adviser, Ms Nobuko Miyairi, are creating a tool which uses artificial intelligence to generate an easy-to-read summary of academic papers.
As the number of journal articles doubles every nine years, with 3.5 million papers published alone in 2017, research shows that almost 50% are never read. An average US faculty reads only 20.66 papers per month, spending 32 minutes each. Young researchers and those whose primary language is not English would take a lot longer. Paper Digest aims to understand more content in less time, producing a single-page summary that can be read in under three minutes.
Yasutomo Takano, Paper Digest co-founder, said: “The sheer volume of scholarly publications brings a big challenge for researchers, and even bigger for non-English speakers like ourselves. It also presents an opportunity, thanks to the growing number of open access publications, to leverage automatic summarisation and enhance our reading efficiency. We hope Paper Digest will be a useful tool both for researchers and for publishers. To that end, receiving the Catalyst Grant is quite timely and we appreciate the recognition very much.”
For press enquiries, please contact
Alex Jackson
Head of Press, Digital Science
a.jackson@digital-science.com
About Digital Science
Digital Science is a technology company working to make research more efficient. We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open and effective. Our portfolio includes admired brands including Altmetric, Anywhere Access, Dimensions, Figshare, ReadCube, Symplectic, IFI Claims, GRID, Overleaf, Labguru, BioRAFT, PeerWith, TetraScience and Transcriptic. We believe that together, we can help researchers make a difference. Visit www.digital-science.com and follow @digitalsci on Twitter.
