Wish I had the 2021 data, but in 2015 about 45% published articles were freely available š [according to creators of unpaywall]. However, opening access to academic research and scholarly communications by making it free does not mean it will be accessible to everyone. These works are full of jargon and contain a gamut of concepts that have been developed over time and within each discipline. It is already hard for an academic to read works from a different discipline than their own; imagine your average reader, scholarly communications will probably be 90% unusable. Each paper comes with so many caveats and a unique language, that having it free does not mean it's decifrable šš§āāļø.
There are several initiatives and startups that are trying to change that. Some of them focus on the general public (The Conversation, RealScientists, AskWonder, PubNiche, ScienceSays), others on specific industries (sparrho, SciLine). Their main goal is to help non-academics discover research, understand it, and keep up to date with it. šš»āāļø If you are building a tool like this, Iād love to meet you, you can ping me on linkedin.
A 10-year old, however, that might be interested in computer science and biology has to rely on internet searches to dig into this area. The kid might know a bit about simulations, but rarely enough to read a bioinformatics paper. Hereās where the latest Frontierās initiative comes in: Five Nobel Prize winners publish scientific article collection forĀ children. š¾ I am quite excited about it and looking forward to more solutions that make academic work truly open.
In other news:
EdSights got $5 million (in addition to $3M prior) to work on a conversational AI chatbot š¤ that supports students throughout their university life. A similar chatbot was developed by mainstay, formerly AdmitHub (raised $900k in grants and $14M in funding), and differ is working out how to get students to help each other with matchmaking bot.
āļøUniversities that exposed their endowments to VC investments are seeing growth of 50%+. It can only get worse from here.
Multiverse (aka WhiteHat), the upskilling platform cofounded by Tony Blairās son (somewhat similar to OpenClassrooms and many other apprenticeship or experiential learning CourseTech) raised š°$130 million.
Last week I wrote about recruiting participants š„ and how itās always a challenge to ensure the quality of the sample and the data researchers are collecting. To follow up on that, Prolific co-founder Ekaterina Damer with a few co-authors published a paper about the quality of data gathered across several participant recruitment platforms. Enjoy!
See you next week!