Website MyScienceWork.com | Alexa rank 83,572 | |
Type of business Global Scientific Platform Available in English, French, Chinese, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian Headquarters San Francisco and Luxembourg Founder(s) Virginie Simon, Tristan Davaille | ||
MyScienceWork is a company that develops online promotion platforms for research institutions, integrated under a single, global portal. Called "Polaris", these platforms make use of various channels available to enhance the dissemination and communication of research: open access to scientific publications, an innovative search engine, and science popularization. The Polaris platforms are connected to an international community of researchers and science enthusiasts via the portal MyScienceWork.com.
Contents
Creation
MyScienceWork was created in August 2010 by Virginie Simon, a researcher in cancer nanotechnology, and Tristan Davaille, a financial engineer. The global platform www.MyScienceWork.com, online since January 2013, provides free and instantaneous access to more than 2,500 scientific databases cataloguing over 31 million research publications available online: over 20 million in open access with PDF download and 10 million priced for individual purchase from scientific publishers. In October 2014, MyScienceWork opened its American offices in San Francisco. The first Polaris platform for research institutions produced by MyScienceWork was released in December 2014.
Purpose
The Polaris platforms are a tool addressing the needs of research institutions in terms of communication, networking, collaborations and steering of research priorities. Researchers are also increasingly active in enhancing their own visibility and impact metrics, as more universities take these measures into account in the promotion and evaluation of researchers. The multichannel communication platforms offered by MyScienceWork include interconnected functionalities responding to these specific needs.
Features
Archives
Polaris is intended for institutions to archive their publications, research data, theses, videos, posters, etc., and may be linked to existing archives, like ArXiv, PubMed and HAL.
Metrics
The metrics tools allow institutions to track the performance of their research teams and their overall production, and observe trends in both. The platform's dashboard provides an overview of publications’ impact, and the metrics can be filtered to report the number of consultations per publication by reader, country and discipline.
Professional Profiles
Researchers create profiles, similar to LinkedIn’s, within their Polaris and can build their network by adding contacts from their own institution or from the greater MyScienceWork international community. Keywords provided in the profile are used by the platform’s tools to offer suggestions of publications and contacts personalized for each user. Other tools designed to facilitate professional collaboration and interaction allow for the sharing of documents and annotating publications.
Dissemination
The homepage of every Polaris platform is dedicated to popular science communication aimed at non-specialists of the field and the public and provides links to the main social networks, including that of the broader MyScienceWork community. In parallel to the platform, institutions have a public institutional profile page displaying a new form of science communication that the company calls “Triplets”. The Triplets present a popularized article alongside the related scientific publication and the profile of the researcher-author.
MyScienceWork and open access
MyScienceWork supports the circulation of open access scientific texts. Its search engine centralizes the main open access databases online, like PubMed, CiteSeer, DOAJ, Research Papers in Economics, ArXiv, HAL, Abes, BioMed Central, CERN, Persee, Revues.org, TEL, ORBI, and Public Library of Science.
In 2012 and 2013, MyScienceWork was the national coordinator of International Open Access Week in France.
OmniScience popular science site
Since 2010, MyScienceWork has featured a popular science media outlet dedicated to news about multidisciplinary professional research. In January 2016, the company launched OmniScience, the new format of its science news site. It features scientific news articles, video abstracts, researcher portraits and opinion pieces, divided into three sections: “Revolution”, exploring emerging practices in science and their impact; “Exploration”, highlighting the diverse professional experiences of researchers; and “Knowledge”, reporting on the latest scientific discoveries. On OmniScience, readers also find collections covering open access, women in science, earning a doctorate and science 2.0. MyScienceWork also produced a weekly video web series called Knock Knock Doc, highlighting PhD students and their research.