Doing research has never been easy or inexpensive for that matter. The cost runs into millions of rupees or even dollars. Today, with the emergence of online collaboration across international boundaries using available asynchronous technologies such as audio/Web or video conferencing, universities and government organizations have been able to bring down the cost of collaborative research.
According to available reports, Harvard Library’s Faculty Advisory Council has told its staff that it is financially untenable for the university to continue paying exorbitant fees to access academic journals. It has suggested that faculty should make their research publicly available and switch to publishing in open access journals. Also, the faculty has been asked to consider resigning from the boards of journals that don’t permit open access.
Knimbus, a global search and collaboration platform, connects creators and users of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) knowledge to online content and peer groups.
How it works?
Knimbus offers a customized platform for each institution so that users are able to access content sources subscribed to by establishments. The platform’s features include a one-stop research hub where users can access and discover trusted and credible information through institutionalized libraries as well as subscribed resources and other Web and open source content. Secondly, it facilitates collaboration between colleagues and other researchers to build collective intelligence and insight. Also, research can be tailored across trusted sources.
Lastly, with the help of available library tools, researchers can seamlessly integrate with the subscribed content, valuable resources and tools of the user organization.
Given the relevance of the platform, the company has about 450 plus subscribers to its Cloud platform with clients spanning all the state universities, IITs and IIMs, and even government research bodies such as C-DAC etc.
“Institutions today spend a lot of money subscribing to STM information. However, it’s quite a challenge to keep abreast of what is being published, especially in the field of science and technology. With so many publishers and sources of information available, one is likely to miss out on some relevant content. Platforms like Knimbus help us locate the latest articles and information of relevance with relative ease,” said Dr Anil Wali, Managing Director, Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), Deans’ Complex, IIT Delhi.
Hunger for Content
As the pace of innovation has accelerated, so has the interest in forming collaborative partnerships for scientific research.
Knimbus is a platform that lets people collaborate online and share studies and related data. “Knimbus is to STM research and scholarly knowledge as Google is to Web search. The articles listed under the Knimbus search engine include both paid-for content from leading STM publishers as well as content from open source communities like the Open Science Project that is publishing free content. Knimbus is creating value by enabling wider, freer and more democratic use of STM knowledge since information only has value in use. It also offers social/collaboration features thereby becoming a single platform for the researcher. More importantly the tags and comments by users enables better, more relevant search results as well as being able to find other, like minded users,” explained Agarwalla.
Talking about the ease of use and the availability of abundant content, Dr. David Vumlallian Zou, Assistant Professor in the History Department, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi, said, “I refer to a number of sources for my research or to stay current with developments in my area of study. It is difficult and time consuming to go to different Web sites and discover relevant content. With Knimbus, I get all of the research content that I need in one place. The key difference in searching for it online and working on Knimbus is that it is customized for Delhi University. Therefore, I only get articles that I can easily access. I find it particularly easy to use clusters on Knimbus to drill down to relevant information.”
Relevance of Collaboration
Collaboration in research has been gaining importance. In fact, recent developments in the area of online collaboration technology, namely Social Research Network Sites (SRNS), specifically aim to support research collaboration. SRNS allow researchers to present themselves, network, communicate and collaborate.
A drawback of this platform is that there is no real-time collaboration and people work in a Wikipedia-like environment wherein posts are put up and other scholars make changes as and when they access it.
Agarwalla said, “It’s an open Cloud platform. We manage the entire infrastructure on which real time collaboration takes place in a secure manner.”
“Our vision is to help democratize knowledge and ensure that everybody gains access to it. People spend huge amounts of money for accessing world-class information. With Knimbus, a researcher not only accesses numerous reports but also saves money. This means that a student of Delhi University (DU) that subscribes to over 100 journals has access to all of the subscribed information by default,” he added.
Dr Wali noted, “The prime mandate for FITT at IIT-Delhi is to encourage collaboration with industry and other organizations. In this engagement process the academic community, which includes the students, plays an important role. The industry wants to leverage the creative potential of students and this platform helps us achieve that.”
Besides, it is also deemed important for top academic institutions to enable and sustain technology transfer activities. This is, in part, driven by high quality research and development as evidenced by good publications and patents.
Dr Zou of DU who had been using content services found broader access to content through Knimbus. “I found it easy to start using Knimbus’ search interface as it’s like Google but with the ability to select sources. It’s a big relief to have a single search bar instead of having to learn how to use the search forms of each publisher,” he said.
He suggested that Knimbus could improve the usability of its service by providing a feature that would only show articles from the user’s domain.
Last Word
Moving on, online collaboration hearkens back to the actual purpose or objective of the Internet when it allowed researchers from one facility to access data stored in another facility’s computer system. People working on different systems could collaborate on projects without leaving their computer labs. The most obvious benefit of online collaboration has been the facilitation of letting people work together on the same project, albeit from a different location. Since, several companies have offices in multiple cities and countries, it’s important to find ways to keep all of the people working on a project informed and engaged.
“People are becoming experts in narrower topics. The need for collaboration, to bring in a different perspective, becomes vital here,” explained Agarwalla.
Despite all the benefits, online collaboration also faces a few roadblocks and the most common one is that of security. For most companies or researchers, data is a valuable commodity. The data sometimes might include sensitive financial information, proprietary formulas and algorithms or secret research. It’s the sort of information that can give a company an edge in the marketplace. It’s definitely not the kind of information that executives want to share with everyone and this remains a primary concern for any organization or scholar before they get hooked on to such open platforms.