Knimbus: A Social Network For Researchers!

India comes low in the R&D, be it the number of researchers, grants or the number of papers published internationally. In addition, a large volume of the resources available for the researcher’s reference are also paid resources leaving only a small percentage accessible for free. This had to change. Bringing their decades of experience in the information and IT industries, Tarun Arora and Rahul Agarwalfounded Knimbus with the aim to provide researchers with better access to resources and collaboration. “We are trying to widen the market. If you look at how the information industry has changed, today anybody can set up a blog. It has become participatory and democratic. We want to do that in the field of research as well,” says Rahul Agarwal, Co-Founder, Knimbus.

Knimbus aims at making information easily available to researchers and also helps them discover other researchers working on the same area of research. Started in November 2010, the platform was launched in June 2012 in its beta with their first set of customers coming on board in September 2011.

So how does Knimbus work? In essence it works like any other social networking website. Knimbus simply allows the user to create a profile and put up the areas the users have worked on along with the papers written by. When users search for a specific content, people who have read similar papers will pop up in the search result and thus users can connect with them.

With a single point access to resources and discovery service, Knimbus provides the user with tools to access the required information with speed. The system is designed to help the researchers keep track of the sources used for the bibliography of their research paper. Like most other social networking sites, Knimbus allows users to like, comment and share any resource with people they are connected to.

Both institutions and individuals can subscribe to Knimbus. There is a free portion service available for individuals. Since 70% of the content on the platform is paid content, only the free content can be accessed by individual subscribers. Institutions also have a free version that they could subscribe to. For bigger institutions, the paid account works best due to the large volume of resources that comes with the paid account.

Privacy concerns come along with anything that is social. Especially with organizations like the Defence Research and Development Organisation accessing the platform, the privacy issue becomes a matter of national security. Currently all posts display only the number of people who have liked it. While this may protect the identity of the people who have read it, it also hinders the purpose of collaboration. Team Knimbus is currently working on addressing these security concerns. Users will soon be able to choose between making their activities public or keeping it private.

Collaboration will be customized to the extent of the collaboration. When the users want to cross the institution boundary to collaborate, they need to make a connection like sending a request to the other user. Only after their request has been accepted, can they collaborate. The institution can decide if they want users to collaborate outside institution because privacy is a concern. “If user doesn’t want something seen then it shall not get stored. Only data that is available to the public gets stored in the system. We are preparing to address the worst. This way even if breached, nobody will get upset about it. Besides it is not just about hacking. Even at an internal level, we don’t want anybody to have access to it,” says Rahul explaining their strategy to handle the security concerns.

Being the first player from India in this business, Knimbus is being used in over 500 institutions across Dubai, Bangladesh and India. Talks are on for subscribers from the U.S as well. Several channels are being employed to market the platform including free trials and channel partners for international collaborations.

“The vision is to build research in India by bridging India with the rest of the world. We are now only in India but we want to expand to the rest of the world. We want to Indian research to an international standard with international collaborations,” concludes Rahul.

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