DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, 10th October 2017 – Knowledge E is pleased to introduce SciCloud as a new type of e-library enabling research organisations and research service providers to collaborate towards a more effective research ecosystem.
Researchers, engineers and other knowledge workers need to continuously stay on top of the latest research in their own fields, understand what the research landscape looks like and what other experts say, as well as often quickly and easily be able to find answers to day-to-day questions about different research topics, standards, reports, laws and regulations, etc. With thousands of new research results being published every single day, fulfilling these needs has become an increasingly daunting task. At the same time, the pace of publishing new research outputs just continuous to accelerate.
In collaboration with several research organisations, Knowledge E has designed SciCloud as a next generation platform bringing knowledge workers, librarians and others that support researchers, together across organisations in a novel approach to research discovery, dissemination and community engagement.
SciCloud has now been released in its first version and has just been taken into live operation at an initial set of research organisations. “This first version focuses on discovery and authentication to ensure a seamless access to any content that the institution has access to, whether it is open access material or behind paywalls” explains Martin Jagerhorn, Chief Innovation Officer at Knowledge E. “This is in itself an improvement to current approaches with an easier search interface and shorter click-paths to download the fulltext items.”
However, as pointed out by the librarians using SciCloud, “the most important aspect is that SciCloud is looking at the users’ behaviour and builds up profiles for each individual in the background. This already provides us with advanced analytics that give us a better understanding of the usage and needs overall in order to engage with the users for trainings, promote certain e-resources or make changes to the subscriptions”. Martin Jagerhorn highlights that even more importantly “this lays the foundation for the platform’s machine learning aspects to ensure that the users will be served with the most relevant information and services in the future, all while preserving each user’s privacy”.
At Knowledge E, the vision is ‘a more knowledgeable world’. This vision is facilitated through sharing and collaboration, and in that spirit, Knowledge E publishes open access journals and conference proceedings, contributes to open source code and works in an open collaboration for open innovation with many of its clients and partners. It is therefore understandable that SciCloud is an open platform, with open APIs for others to interact with, enabling everyone to work together and collaborate across organisational borders and therefore improve the research ecosystem.
“We do encourage research organisations and research service providers world-wide to join the collaboration around SciCloud” says Kamran Kardan, CEO at Knowledge E. “It’s an endless journey with many challenges, and by working together we can enable researchers to advance the research front faster and more successfully to the benefit of all of us.”
About Knowledge E
Knowledge E was established in 2012 and has quickly become synonymous with collaboration, innovation and progression. Based in Dubai, UAE, at the centre of a region of vision and ambition, Knowledge E works passionately with all types of organisations and government entities within research and education to support their continued innovation and development by providing them with leading expertise, information resources and software solutions. This includes SciCloud for research discovery, the KnE Publishing Platform for open access journal and conference proceedings publishing & indexing, along with associated capacity-building training services for researchers, librarians and research managers to professionalise their research and publishing activities.