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Scholarly Publishing Shark Tank: Where to Invest to Achieve Our Goals
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Scholarly Publishing Shark Tank: Where to Invest to Achieve Our Goals
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Segment:0 .
All right. Welcome, everyone. I probably have some people trickling in, but we're going to go ahead and get started because we are packing a lot into this session. So welcome. Good morning. It is Friday morning.
It is the last day of the conference. I know firsthand how late some of you are out, so I hope you are caffeinated. We are going to keep things lively in this session. It's a very interactive session. We're excited to hear the pitches that you all are going to come up with during the session. But first, I am delighted to introduce my all-star shiver of sharks shiver being the collective noun for a group of sharks.
So yeah, so we have with us Dustin Smith, President and co-founder of hum, Lauren Kane, CEO of one, Martin Malan from the foundry at American Chemical Society, and Doctor Trevor Cone, founder and President of sarmast AI and director of scientific outreach at ACIP. I am Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen, VP of marketing at Silverchair. I'll be the moderator today. And unfortunately, the left shark was so inspired by the opening plenary that he went on a why sharks matter campaign.
Can't join us today. But we're going to do what we can. So we pitched the session back in the fall because it's been a really interesting few years for investment in scholarly publishing. There's been new startups. There was the formation of the scholarly publishing angels for Angel investments. There's been growth investments from external VC funds.
But since that time, the topic of funding in scholarly publishing has become increasingly urgent, substantial and decidedly less fun. So today, we are going to try and instill a little fun back into what is now a very serious topic. We're living in very challenging times for research funding. Budgets are tighter, priorities are competing, and every dollar needs to count. So these constraints certainly are obstacles, but there are also opportunities to get creative, strategic and maybe a little bold.
So today, instead of just talking about investment strategies in scholarly publishing, you are going to put them into action. So we have a million up for grabs. It's up to you to decide where it gets invested. And yes, this is pretend dollars. We did not get enough craft donations to the SSP originals auction to raise the funds. So we're just going to use pretend money today.
So before we dive into the framework, however, I'm going to ask our panel to introduce themselves and share what their involvement is with investment in the industry and share their view on the current investment challenges in scholarly publishing. Do you want to go first. Yes hi, I'm Chevy shahan. In relevant to today's context, I am a founder and President of an AI consultancy called sarmast AI.
I'm on a board of advisory boards for certain AI enterprises that are focusing on STEM research, science in general, and also minority owned startups. And also, I'm one of the facilitators of the SSP, AI community of interest, which has close to 300 global members. And we together focus on exploring the impact of AI on our industry. And we also invite vendors who are in the industry to talk about their challenges and the impact their AI tools are going to make on the industry.
The two biggest challenges, I mean, there are several challenges, and I don't have to spell it out. But I think one of the biggest challenges our industry is facing right now will be the revenue uncertainty, with the traditional sources of funding either drying up or disappearing. And the second I would say is market consolidation. So if you're pitching your ideas, you may want to think about how you may want to sell it to some of the big fish in the market.
Or are you going to focus on multiple small partnerships, or are you going to be succumbed by the fear of getting eaten up or scooped. You can be more brief. That was a long one. All right. So thanks for having me. My name is Mario.
I'm the director of innovation at the foundry at ax. What or what team I'm spearheading is trying to do is exactly bridge the gap. The gap Stephanie talked about in this industry, there's very little growth capital, very little institutional capital. There's a lot of highly mission driven founders. There's a lot of great tech, but they need some help. And this is where we believe we can come in and help these founders grow.
And hopefully we can change the tech space a bit. My background is in tech. I'm an ex founder. I'm an ex corporate innovator and now also an investor and a shark. Hi, I'm Lauren Cain, I'm the CEO of one. But today, I'm here actually as amateur novice investor. I was an investor or am an investor in x auto, a company that many of you may be familiar with.
Or Paul Callahan, who There we go. Paul in the back. And then actually made my I had to break it to poor Paul that he was not the only founder in my life anymore and recently made a second investment in a company you may not have heard of called lit maps that operates a B2C researcher tools model out of New Zealand. So, as has been pointed out to me by my fellow sharks, I have a thing for companies in countries with lots of sheep.
So we'll make some jokes about that later. But I think my philosophy or strategy, if you could say that by virtue of two investments as a investor would be. And this is really where my background in bio one and with other companies in the industry has come forward, is that interest in scale and how can these companies address the needs of smaller societies, smaller publishers in the market.
We all know it's easy to sell to some of the big fish in the pond, but if an idea is really going to have legs over the long term have to be able to sell into the smaller end of the market and especially in a budget compressed environment. As such, we're in I think the ideas that I'm most interested in are those that are going to help compress those costs and provide more mission impact in the long run.
Cool this one. Dustin Smith, co-founder of hum. We help put frontier AI to work to help publishers understand their audience, understand their content, help with peer review. And I spend the money that these people have, and I try to turn that into useful things. And so my invocation is to build something that people want. And so you should be building things that people want. And that's how I'll be allocating my votes at least.
All right. Thank you. Sharks OK. So hopefully that helps to inform some of the considerations that you will make as you craft your pitches. Here's the framework that we are going to be using to help craft. These are also on the worksheets that are on your tables. Please take a moment to appreciate the graphic.
I was very proud of that. So as part of this, first of all, we're going to frame up the problem. This is something we're going to decide on collectively. So then you'll think about what is the solution. How does it solve the problem. Is it novel. Who is the market. Who is the target audience.
What is the impact that the solution will accomplish. How will it benefit scholarly publishing. Is it feasible. Is it technologically feasible. Is it economically feasible. Does it have a market. And then what are the resources that you need in order to actually implement this pitch. So to give you an idea of what a solid pitch looks like, I'm going to turn it over to Dustin to give one he's given many times.
Solid is what we're going to go for right here. So you're a journal editor. It's Friday afternoon. You're exhausted. You still have a giant stack of manuscripts on your desk. It takes over an hour per manuscript. There's no way you're going to get all through them. What if instead of going through each PDF pages and pages, scrolling up and down, you could have a virtual colleague who looked at the entire stack.
And recommended things to fast track, recommended things to redirect, and for the things that needed deeper consideration, pointed you to the exact references and citations and images. Figures that you need to look at did deep textual analysis and did various sorts of summarization and methods. Methods extraction. So that's actually alchemist review. It already exists.
It's live with American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Institute of Physics, Oxford University Press, and we have a bunch more publishers that are coming on board right now. This is something that has the prospect of saving an individual editor hours per week, and in aggregate, something like five million editor hours per year. Huge potential impact.
So we of course, are raising $10 million at 100 million pre. Sorry these are inside jokes for the investment people. And we're going to go to the moon hopefully together. So we're also looking for other publishers to come on board. Thank you very much. Very nice. Available in the exhibit Hall. All right.
So next up we're going to have some key judging metrics that our sharks will think about after you present your pitch. Implementability sustainability. Measurability and impact. And we'll be thinking about what is the main takeaway for something we can do in the next month or two. All right. Now for the interactive portion of this event, please open your SSP engage app.
Navigate to this session. You will find a poll. And here are the subjects we're going to vote on. We're going to pick five that we're going to dive into today and develop pitches for. So while you're doing your voting I'll run through these. So I'm going to run through the problem statements. So researchers often work in silos limiting interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge sharing across geographical and institutional boundaries.
Research workflow optimization tools. Scientists faced inefficiencies in data collection, analysis, manuscript preparation, leading to delays in research output and publication. Many published studies cannot be reproduced, undermining scientific credibility and wasting research. Resources for complex scientific findings are frequently inaccessible to non-specialist audiences, is hindering public understanding and support for research.
Number five academic publishing systems favor Western institutions and English language content, creating barriers for researchers from non-western countries and limiting global scientific progress. Many valuable research projects are stuck behind paywalls or lack funding for open access publication. Traditional citation metrics like the impact factor, are criticized for being too simplistic and failing to account for the true value of academic work.
Academic Publishing is often criticized for its environmental impact, especially with paper based journals and waste, and finally, the potential for bias and fairness issues in peer review is a growing concern for scholarly publishing. So just do a little refresh here, see what the results are. OK, we've got some winners. So we've got our five.
Oh are you still voting. OK you're supposed to be voting while I read it. Torches and pitchforks. They're coming for you. All right, we'll give it a minute. OK I'm just going to describe what we're going to do next before we look at startups need to be fast. So let's get going guys.
So what we're going to do after we get these is there are five big post-it pads. We're going to divide into groups. You may either do the topic that's where you're sitting, or you can get up and move around and go to the one that appeals to you the most. You will use these worksheets and easel pads to come up with your pitch and pick one to two representatives to present a two minute pitch.
And yes, I will cut you off at two minutes. So you're going to have 15 minutes to develop those. And then we're going to come back together. Has everyone voted OK. All right. We have the same results in the end. So this is good OK.
All right. So our topics are going to be scientific collaboration and networking platforms research workflow optimization tools. Middle of the room. Wait did I do the right number. Yes scientific solutions addressing research integrity and reproducibility. Back corner.
Scientific communication and community outreach. And in this corner ethical AI and peer review. So it is 1113. We will come back together at 11:30. Yes we're going to. We're going we have volunteers that are going to write these too. So ethical AI and peer review back corner. This is scientific communication and community outreach center is solutions addressing research integrity scientific collaboration and networking platforms research workflow optimization tools.
Elizabeth do you get it. All right. That's it. I'm going to ride it. What you're doing. It's like 1,000 silver. Are we supposed to go around. I don't know.
I don't know. You just look like. Impressive comfortable. I'm basically watching all these races. I didn't know that. Yeah well, I mean, you could do a quick scan. You normally don't have to.
So she did have so much energy. She did. Just a little delay. Oh wrong one. Do they know how long it's too late for them.
They've already come for us. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. All right, so now we can circulate and answer questions. What sort of. Do you have any idea. Yeah Oh, yeah.
Yeah Yeah. Yeah I love.
Yeah Yeah.
Yeah OK.
All right.
So I think that. This, it doesn't matter. So I don't know.
Why over here.
These are the. Oh wow. So I was just talking.
About yeah.
All right. This is your 5 minute Warning. Make sure you've chosen your representative to give your pitch. You good. You need me. I mean, I love a theme, right.
Yeah Me too. You and me both. I'm so sorry.
I'm so excited. I have not.
Heard I know.
I am. I am, sure. I will.
You guys feel good about yourself. Yes it's not.
Every day we strive for. Sustainable so working with you on that. Thank you. Yeah so I'm going to walk around with this.
OK well, we have two. Yeah all right. It is 11:30. So wrap up the last bit of your pitches. Any questions. Make sure you have a representative chosen. And if you want to start making your way back to your tables, if you guys are squeezed in, we're going to go around and start the pitches in just a minute to the controller, do you mean.
Wrapping up. I don't want to rush you. Did I mention there are prizes. We have gummy sharks for the winner. So not quite $1 million, but. Yeah all right.
Are we ready. Everyone feeling good. Feeling confident. You have your representatives chosen. All right. Hopefully, the other outcome of this session is that you'll all be much more sympathetic to hearing pitches in the future, because now you know all the work that goes into them.
All right. This group looks very confident. So we're going to start over here. All right. All right everybody. All right let's be a good audience. We're going to hear the pitches now. All right.
Thanks, Mike. And your time is now. We have 22 minutes. Two minutes. So you see everything on the board here. The problem is research workflow optimization tools. And the problem we are trying to solve is, how do we reduce the barriers to collaboration amongst the cross-functional or interdisciplinary researchers.
Because when a mathematician and a biologist come together and they are trying to do research, they don't understand each other's world. They don't understand each other's language. And when they go through that motion, there's a lot of fight, a lot of commotion. So that's the problem we are trying to solve. And what we imagine is a solution is you imagine a big digital Canvas like Miro if you have used.
So that's a Canvas where you can put your brain dump. If I'm a mathematician, is that biologist. We start dropping our papers, our data, the images we have taken, the notes we might have scribbled and using LLM and LLM is watching all of that. Of course, private LLM so that it does not get leaked, but its understanding in real time, all the data we are dumping there, all the information. And if I am that mathematician and he has done something related to biology, it translates in real time for me.
It speaks in my language and likewise it does for him. Or if there are more people, there are more collaborators. So that's what we are trying to do. Because in when it comes to the real research comes through collaboration. The real innovation comes through collaboration. New ideas emerge. And that's what we are trying to solve through this, the market, all of the researchers write globally.
So the world is our oyster there, but especially people who are looking to collaborate and as well as institutions. That's how we want to monetize it. The impact would be that of course, it will speed up communication, drive more innovation, the fields which do not get much attention if it reduces the barrier to that collaboration. It might actually get more prominence and it's good for the world.
Feasibility technology wise, we know that it's already possible economical feasibility through institutional subscriptions. We could monetize that. And the resources we need is fund for platform development, GTM and tie UPS with the institutions. So that's our pitch for the day. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. All right. Sharks questions for the group. It may be helpful for future groups. We're the ones with the money. So it's important that we understand where the audience effectively.
So just being a shark in case you like money to his head. Sorry that was just a meta note. Well thank you so much. It's hard to go first to. So I want to applaud you. And I especially liked your spokes model there. That was good work. Mike on the poster. I think you spoke to this a little bit, but I think the biggest thing that I see is that set tough market, research, optimization, workflow tools.
There's a ton out there. I like that you put a special spin on it. But I do think the biggest challenge, yes, there's a huge market for it. But what makes this different. What's the special sauce that is going to be if you can only buy one tool. Why is it this one I think is the key challenge that I see. Can you speak to that.
Yeah there are a lot of tools. Yes Google. Yes Miro. Yes but they have the whole world to care about. They don't understand researchers and they won't care. We understand that. We understand the world deeply. We understand research. We understand all the disciplines.
So that's where the context comes in. That's what will make it special. So if a researcher has to go for that one tool, that should be us. Excellent Let's hear it for this group. Any other questions from the Sharks. All right. Next, group.
Thank you. They've even got branding. Yeah, we did our best. Oh, beautiful has a meaning. Oh, yeah. All right. So, sharks. Picture this.
A young researcher attends her first big conference. She nervously gives a poster presentation on a niche topic in cardiovascular AI. Afterward, two people from different institutions approach her. One is working on early detection models, the other a grant reviewer exploring real world data applications. They chat, they exchange cards, and then nothing.
The moment fades, the spark dies in the inbox, and this happens thousands of times at every meeting we run. We design events and publish research to spark connection, but we don't actually support it. We let collaboration die in the hallway. That is why we built castalia IO, a platform that maps the hidden constellations of scholarly collaboration and keeps those moments alive. Castalia takes the data you already collect from abstract speakers, submissions, and author affiliations and turns it into a living, identity linked collaboration graph.
It shows you where your members are working, how they're connected, what ideas are clustering, and where your next editorial opportunity or special issue should be born. Think of it as your mission map. The clearest view of how your community is growing, connecting, and advancing in the field. Our special sauce. We use no new social layer, no logins, no separate platform to adopt.
We link directly to ORCID grants and institutional metadata, and we apply light AI to identify real potential collaborations, not just co-authorships or likes. You're already sitting on this data. We just show you the stars. We're seeking $250,000. We are seeking $250,000 in two society partners to bring this to life, not as another network, but as a community insight engine that strengthens your mission and elevates your members because your events and journals are the stars.
Constellation connects the cosmos. Let's make every spark count. Wow why do I think you already had this planned. All right. Sharks so you came up with that in 15 minutes. I did not, but we did. Wonderful collaboration. Collaboration?
we are the collaboration. So this is fantastic. Sold with a question in the current climate, and especially if we're looking at virtual platforms of interactions, how would kunstler capture those prints and guide our future behavior. That's what I want to capture.
What? yeah. Ask one more time. Yeah so we're talking about poster presentations and the footprint that you're capturing at an in-person meeting with diminishing budgets and a lot more virtual meetings happening now, how would you capture that footprint to make recommendations, to be able to capture the data through the different systems that already are existing through the API, and then the metadata that we can just pull out of systems like m EJP ScholarOne, they're holding all that metadata famously easy to integrate with.
But what. 250,000 is nowhere near enough. But what if a bunch of them were doing a whole bunch of enhancements. With an exception, of course. Working at a tech company, I'll say the answer is often just APIs. APIs any other questions. No, I would just say that we've clearly noted this down, so perhaps we should speak afterwards after this.
All right. Thank you very much. Nice talking to you. Where did that come from. All right. Next up, middle of the room. Who is our representative. All right, we're done here.
All right. So just following them around the room. All right. These guys. Yeah This is the slide. There's just waiting when you come in the room so you can see we haven't started.
Beautiful so researchers don't want to reproduce other people's research. But we need to know that the research that is being published by us is trusted, can be trusted and can be built upon. So how do we incentivize people publishing really high quality research. What we do is we create the reproducibility box. Box, box, ladies and gentlemen, is a highly trained AI model that can suck, that publishers can deploy alongside published journal articles to increase trust in science, and not only will it affect the publishers and their reputation, but also the individuals and institutions who will no longer like Harvard, have to fire someone for publishing a reputable.
No, that's not going to work. Irreproducible global studies. So we're really, really excited about this. We're going to start out small, right. We're going to start out by training for a specific field which is epidemiology. I can't say that word. Training on PubMed data, making sure that we have a really transparent model where people understand and trust the reproducibility itself.
Then we're going to take it and scale and think about what do we need in terms of incentives. Researchers need to be able to have a verification, a badge that says, yes, my research is reproducible. We are thinking of pitching to Clarivate to digital science. Maybe this reproducibility should become another part of that Altmetric donut. Maybe it goes alongside your site score.
Universities can have a trust seal on their website that says 99% of our research is reproducible and the robot is really cute. That's it. I love the starting small. Love the single discipline to start. See if there's legs on it. But how do you see that path and who I kind of missed.
Who is. What's your business model or who is your initial audience for those that epidemiology pilot. So starting small it means we can use data that already exists. We would need the seed money to build reproducibility, and we would be proving an area of research that is a bit sketchy. And people do have quite a significant amount of problems with reproducibility.
We would then demonstrate that value with a core set of crucial journals. We would prove with a core set of institutions that this is something that is valuable to them. And that is valuable to researchers and to trust in science. And then we would take that, and we would pitch that into someone who has a bigger resources to really scale that.
So the distribution model would be B2B or B2C to be back to the institutions. I'm just it'd be a B2B model. B2B model. Other questions. All right. Let's hear it for reproducibility.
Instead of chasing rooms in the back. Do you want to come up here. Do you want me to to you. OK, I'm coming back there. All right. Every year, we spend billions of dollars on research that creates world changing discoveries. We've got cancer breakthroughs.
There are climate solutions, AI advances. But the big scandal is that 95% of this research never reaches the public who actually funded it. It dies in these really dense academic papers that only 12 people ever read. Meanwhile, researchers are desperately needing career advancement, but they're struggling to show their broader impact for tenure. And then publishers are losing relevance as the public turns to TikTok for science and very often, fake science instead of the real academic research that is legitimate.
So our solution is bridge. So picture this a researcher gets their paper, accepted. Our AI immediately interviews them about what excites them most. It transforms their work into compelling stories for different audiences. It connects them with proven communicators in their field, including lay communicators who can help really connect this to more public audiences.
It generates social content, it can create infographics to help things resonate, and also media pitches. And it will automatically capture all of this information in a tenure portfolio with impact metrics that they can use to create tenure packets. Now, the business model, because I know we're all wondering, publishers are going to pay for this.
And publishers in the room, you might be like, how Why? well, let me tell you because when the research that's published with you goes viral, your journals will be must publish impact destinations. So your impact factors go up and then the subscriptions follow. We believe that researchers will, of course, also love this because it will help with their career advancement. And then publishers.
Again, you get the prestige. We get that big splashy, that big splashy go to market. We don't often talk about with go to market with research, but it really needs help here. So our ask sharks is for $4 million initially to help capture the $25 billion scholarly publishing market. Thank you.
Thank you. Interesting questions. No, we were just giving you shit, frankly. No, the $25 billion total addressable market may be the total revenue running over all publishers, but sure. So it's what might you think your TAM total addressable market might be for this sort of solution. Basically media for.
It's a great question. And if I had more than 15 minutes, I could tell you about our answer. All right. Yeah we can ask questions. Anybody else. He's the tough shark. I love the name first of all.
So a+ for simplicity the bridge. And I love the concept. I think the biggest challenge is going to be yes, publishers need to pay for this and why. And I think it's that the trickle down philosophy that we sometimes think will work in the market, that is trickier as budgets get tighter, it's that we all like the illusion that publishers care about researchers and what they're going to do with the research.
Oh, sorry. Sorry spicy. Different panel. Different panel. So maybe equally hard question to Dustin. Just give me one example of what your pitch would be to a cash strapped publisher. So not one of the big guys about why they should serve their researchers in doing this and adopting the bridge.
Yeah, I think with that, I would honestly start with a question and ask them about the biggest paper that they were super surprised, didn't go viral, and then ask them why they think that is. And then I lead into my pitch. Nice all right. Last but not least, ethical AI and peer review. Thank you.
So hello. My name is Paul. And as we all bias and fairness is like a growing issue in the peer review system. And every publisher is solving their issue in a different way with their own data sets, with their own tools, purchasing different tools and building their own processes. So basically, it's a mess out there and we're going to fix that.
We need one trusted platform where everyone knows they can trust the work done in that platform, and they trust the people on that platform. So we will first help identify publishers to identify reviewers across the globe. It can never be only people from one continent, right. To make sure that it's fair across the globe. And then we guide the users to reviewers to with the help of AI, to make a good review of the work.
The reviewers claim their profile. So we know they are an actual person. The editors can actually score the work, so over time, we will build up the trust that we know. Like, OK, these people are actually doing a good job, and these may be doing less good of a job. And like building every community Facebook, LinkedIn, we need some investment to actually build the community before we can make our own money.
I think this is quite a big opportunity. We start with the publishers because they're the issue is most stringent there, and they're probably most willing to invest. But there's definitely an opportunity to grow, to publish not only publishers, but also funders in the end, not for peer review, but they also want to trust their reviewers to see who's. Eligible to receive the funds.
Yeah, that's all about it. So let's have a coffee after this and I'll share my bank details. Thank you. So Paul. What's the ask. Is it a venture case or is it another angel strapped model that you're looking at here.
What are we looking for. Yeah what's your plan. To get to $100 million in R.N. That's what you need for the venture case. So if there's no answer to that then you're a small seed case. So again, two 100 million R.N. Yeah in a 5 to seven years. Easy question.
Sorry easy question. Yeah we don't know yet. Any other questions. All right. Amazing pitches. Let's see if I can find my way through here. Back up to the front. What?
we are going to go through the Sharks now. The sharks are going to make their individual recommendations and share some of their thinking behind why they would invest in certain pitches, et cetera. And then if we have time, we can do a little bit of sharing and ask questions of the Sharks as well. But, Dustin, you want to kick us off. Sure where am I putting my money. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to split it.
This team right here, you're going to need a lot of money. But it's really. Access and integration are the two key challenges. So the publicly available data. Fine place to start. But you really need the proprietary data that's inside publishers. And that means a ton of different systems, including Paul's including ScholarOne and some of the others.
You may be preferentially advantaged in that case, given who's at the table. But very, very exciting. This is especially events very, very hot sort of place that is a revenue driver. And so something where you actually could sell into that group both a value add. And potentially some B2B, B2C plays. And then the group in the back, we did give you shit, but I love the idea.
You could do it very capital light 4 million is way too much. No way. Giving you that much. Maybe 250. Ultimately looking to work with a small cohort of publishers, get the results, show the results, and trace them all the way back to a lift in something impact factor. But ideally, things like citations.
So basically sell the results instead of sell the idea. But thank you everybody. This is great. All right. Yeah I mean, honestly a big congratulations to everyone. This is not easy at all. These are some tough questions. And we gave you 15 minutes to come up with the next big ideas in publishing.
In a market that we all if we had even those ideas after a decade, none of us would probably be in this room. So great job on everything. I am also putting my money, all of my money with the bridge. Love the idea. I do think one of the ideas reasons that it appeals to me is I agree with you, Dustin, that I think this is really lightweight to get off the ground.
I think it's also really resonates with some of the key issues that we're seeing right now in scholarly publishing. We know we need to get better in terms of scientific communication. We know we need to get better at assisting researchers in telling their story to defend science, especially in the present moment. And publishers have not just a responsibility and opportunity to do this.
Even if you look at it just from a purely capitalistic perspective, if we want to keep publishing going, we're going to have to remain relevant. So I actually think this is an absolutely critical idea to do things in this regard to keep that going. So great work. You kind of both. Well, congratulations on the pitch.
So the pitch was perfect from the first group constellation right. Yeah But I have to echo my Justin and Lauren. The bridge seems like a winner in my view as well. You can get this off the ground pretty fast. Find the right investors and you can grow it to scale.
So that would be my bet as well. Yeah and you probably don't want to take anybody's money. You should do this for don't take anybody's money. It's jail. Yeah Hey, but don't ask, don't ask, don't get. So excellent pitches. Excellent pitches. Everyone and some of the things that were highlighted, like the workflow optimization as well as focus on research integrity.
We know these are critical to our daily livelihood. But at the same time, I would also like to go with the bridge. Just given the current circumstances, it's imminent that we interact with the lay public, people who are sitting on the other side of the fence to be able to communicate what we are doing, how we're bringing about the needed difference friends and how they should collectively support our industry for us to survive.
But I would applaud you for your pitch. Maybe you want to hire these guys for communication pitch. And also, I like the growth mindset. So go for whatever you're asking for because you have four sharks behind you now. Yeah all right. Thank you so much. Sharks we do have a few minutes for questions. If anyone has questions or if you want to share anything that kind of surprised you in the process, or that you learned in the process, or that you might take away from this.
Everyone knows everything about investing now. Great OK. All right. Well, we'll. Last, last chance. So So the bridge. Please help yourself to some shark gummies. Thank you everyone so much for coming.
I hope you had fun. Yeah have a good rest of the meeting.
Segment:0 .
All right. Welcome, everyone. I probably have some people trickling in, but we're going to go ahead and get started because we are packing a lot into this session. So welcome. Good morning. It is Friday morning.
It is the last day of the conference. I know firsthand how late some of you are out, so I hope you are caffeinated. We are going to keep things lively in this session. It's a very interactive session. We're excited to hear the pitches that you all are going to come up with during the session. But first, I am delighted to introduce my all-star shiver of sharks shiver being the collective noun for a group of sharks.
So yeah, so we have with us Dustin Smith, President and co-founder of hum, Lauren Kane, CEO of one, Martin Malan from the foundry at American Chemical Society, and Doctor Trevor Cone, founder and President of sarmast AI and director of scientific outreach at ACIP. I am Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen, VP of marketing at Silverchair. I'll be the moderator today. And unfortunately, the left shark was so inspired by the opening plenary that he went on a why sharks matter campaign.
Can't join us today. But we're going to do what we can. So we pitched the session back in the fall because it's been a really interesting few years for investment in scholarly publishing. There's been new startups. There was the formation of the scholarly publishing angels for Angel investments. There's been growth investments from external VC funds.
But since that time, the topic of funding in scholarly publishing has become increasingly urgent, substantial and decidedly less fun. So today, we are going to try and instill a little fun back into what is now a very serious topic. We're living in very challenging times for research funding. Budgets are tighter, priorities are competing, and every dollar needs to count. So these constraints certainly are obstacles, but there are also opportunities to get creative, strategic and maybe a little bold.
So today, instead of just talking about investment strategies in scholarly publishing, you are going to put them into action. So we have a million up for grabs. It's up to you to decide where it gets invested. And yes, this is pretend dollars. We did not get enough craft donations to the SSP originals auction to raise the funds. So we're just going to use pretend money today.
So before we dive into the framework, however, I'm going to ask our panel to introduce themselves and share what their involvement is with investment in the industry and share their view on the current investment challenges in scholarly publishing. Do you want to go first. Yes hi, I'm Chevy shahan. In relevant to today's context, I am a founder and President of an AI consultancy called sarmast AI.
I'm on a board of advisory boards for certain AI enterprises that are focusing on STEM research, science in general, and also minority owned startups. And also, I'm one of the facilitators of the SSP, AI community of interest, which has close to 300 global members. And we together focus on exploring the impact of AI on our industry. And we also invite vendors who are in the industry to talk about their challenges and the impact their AI tools are going to make on the industry.
The two biggest challenges, I mean, there are several challenges, and I don't have to spell it out. But I think one of the biggest challenges our industry is facing right now will be the revenue uncertainty, with the traditional sources of funding either drying up or disappearing. And the second I would say is market consolidation. So if you're pitching your ideas, you may want to think about how you may want to sell it to some of the big fish in the market.
Or are you going to focus on multiple small partnerships, or are you going to be succumbed by the fear of getting eaten up or scooped. You can be more brief. That was a long one. All right. So thanks for having me. My name is Mario.
I'm the director of innovation at the foundry at ax. What or what team I'm spearheading is trying to do is exactly bridge the gap. The gap Stephanie talked about in this industry, there's very little growth capital, very little institutional capital. There's a lot of highly mission driven founders. There's a lot of great tech, but they need some help. And this is where we believe we can come in and help these founders grow.
And hopefully we can change the tech space a bit. My background is in tech. I'm an ex founder. I'm an ex corporate innovator and now also an investor and a shark. Hi, I'm Lauren Cain, I'm the CEO of one. But today, I'm here actually as amateur novice investor. I was an investor or am an investor in x auto, a company that many of you may be familiar with.
Or Paul Callahan, who There we go. Paul in the back. And then actually made my I had to break it to poor Paul that he was not the only founder in my life anymore and recently made a second investment in a company you may not have heard of called lit maps that operates a B2C researcher tools model out of New Zealand. So, as has been pointed out to me by my fellow sharks, I have a thing for companies in countries with lots of sheep.
So we'll make some jokes about that later. But I think my philosophy or strategy, if you could say that by virtue of two investments as a investor would be. And this is really where my background in bio one and with other companies in the industry has come forward, is that interest in scale and how can these companies address the needs of smaller societies, smaller publishers in the market.
We all know it's easy to sell to some of the big fish in the pond, but if an idea is really going to have legs over the long term have to be able to sell into the smaller end of the market and especially in a budget compressed environment. As such, we're in I think the ideas that I'm most interested in are those that are going to help compress those costs and provide more mission impact in the long run.
Cool this one. Dustin Smith, co-founder of hum. We help put frontier AI to work to help publishers understand their audience, understand their content, help with peer review. And I spend the money that these people have, and I try to turn that into useful things. And so my invocation is to build something that people want. And so you should be building things that people want. And that's how I'll be allocating my votes at least.
All right. Thank you. Sharks OK. So hopefully that helps to inform some of the considerations that you will make as you craft your pitches. Here's the framework that we are going to be using to help craft. These are also on the worksheets that are on your tables. Please take a moment to appreciate the graphic.
I was very proud of that. So as part of this, first of all, we're going to frame up the problem. This is something we're going to decide on collectively. So then you'll think about what is the solution. How does it solve the problem. Is it novel. Who is the market. Who is the target audience.
What is the impact that the solution will accomplish. How will it benefit scholarly publishing. Is it feasible. Is it technologically feasible. Is it economically feasible. Does it have a market. And then what are the resources that you need in order to actually implement this pitch. So to give you an idea of what a solid pitch looks like, I'm going to turn it over to Dustin to give one he's given many times.
Solid is what we're going to go for right here. So you're a journal editor. It's Friday afternoon. You're exhausted. You still have a giant stack of manuscripts on your desk. It takes over an hour per manuscript. There's no way you're going to get all through them. What if instead of going through each PDF pages and pages, scrolling up and down, you could have a virtual colleague who looked at the entire stack.
And recommended things to fast track, recommended things to redirect, and for the things that needed deeper consideration, pointed you to the exact references and citations and images. Figures that you need to look at did deep textual analysis and did various sorts of summarization and methods. Methods extraction. So that's actually alchemist review. It already exists.
It's live with American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Institute of Physics, Oxford University Press, and we have a bunch more publishers that are coming on board right now. This is something that has the prospect of saving an individual editor hours per week, and in aggregate, something like five million editor hours per year. Huge potential impact.
So we of course, are raising $10 million at 100 million pre. Sorry these are inside jokes for the investment people. And we're going to go to the moon hopefully together. So we're also looking for other publishers to come on board. Thank you very much. Very nice. Available in the exhibit Hall. All right.
So next up we're going to have some key judging metrics that our sharks will think about after you present your pitch. Implementability sustainability. Measurability and impact. And we'll be thinking about what is the main takeaway for something we can do in the next month or two. All right. Now for the interactive portion of this event, please open your SSP engage app.
Navigate to this session. You will find a poll. And here are the subjects we're going to vote on. We're going to pick five that we're going to dive into today and develop pitches for. So while you're doing your voting I'll run through these. So I'm going to run through the problem statements. So researchers often work in silos limiting interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge sharing across geographical and institutional boundaries.
Research workflow optimization tools. Scientists faced inefficiencies in data collection, analysis, manuscript preparation, leading to delays in research output and publication. Many published studies cannot be reproduced, undermining scientific credibility and wasting research. Resources for complex scientific findings are frequently inaccessible to non-specialist audiences, is hindering public understanding and support for research.
Number five academic publishing systems favor Western institutions and English language content, creating barriers for researchers from non-western countries and limiting global scientific progress. Many valuable research projects are stuck behind paywalls or lack funding for open access publication. Traditional citation metrics like the impact factor, are criticized for being too simplistic and failing to account for the true value of academic work.
Academic Publishing is often criticized for its environmental impact, especially with paper based journals and waste, and finally, the potential for bias and fairness issues in peer review is a growing concern for scholarly publishing. So just do a little refresh here, see what the results are. OK, we've got some winners. So we've got our five.
Oh are you still voting. OK you're supposed to be voting while I read it. Torches and pitchforks. They're coming for you. All right, we'll give it a minute. OK I'm just going to describe what we're going to do next before we look at startups need to be fast. So let's get going guys.
So what we're going to do after we get these is there are five big post-it pads. We're going to divide into groups. You may either do the topic that's where you're sitting, or you can get up and move around and go to the one that appeals to you the most. You will use these worksheets and easel pads to come up with your pitch and pick one to two representatives to present a two minute pitch.
And yes, I will cut you off at two minutes. So you're going to have 15 minutes to develop those. And then we're going to come back together. Has everyone voted OK. All right. We have the same results in the end. So this is good OK.
All right. So our topics are going to be scientific collaboration and networking platforms research workflow optimization tools. Middle of the room. Wait did I do the right number. Yes scientific solutions addressing research integrity and reproducibility. Back corner.
Scientific communication and community outreach. And in this corner ethical AI and peer review. So it is 1113. We will come back together at 11:30. Yes we're going to. We're going we have volunteers that are going to write these too. So ethical AI and peer review back corner. This is scientific communication and community outreach center is solutions addressing research integrity scientific collaboration and networking platforms research workflow optimization tools.
Elizabeth do you get it. All right. That's it. I'm going to ride it. What you're doing. It's like 1,000 silver. Are we supposed to go around. I don't know.
I don't know. You just look like. Impressive comfortable. I'm basically watching all these races. I didn't know that. Yeah well, I mean, you could do a quick scan. You normally don't have to.
So she did have so much energy. She did. Just a little delay. Oh wrong one. Do they know how long it's too late for them.
They've already come for us. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. All right, so now we can circulate and answer questions. What sort of. Do you have any idea. Yeah Oh, yeah.
Yeah Yeah. Yeah I love.
Yeah Yeah.
Yeah OK.
All right.
So I think that. This, it doesn't matter. So I don't know.
Why over here.
These are the. Oh wow. So I was just talking.
About yeah.
All right. This is your 5 minute Warning. Make sure you've chosen your representative to give your pitch. You good. You need me. I mean, I love a theme, right.
Yeah Me too. You and me both. I'm so sorry.
I'm so excited. I have not.
Heard I know.
I am. I am, sure. I will.
You guys feel good about yourself. Yes it's not.
Every day we strive for. Sustainable so working with you on that. Thank you. Yeah so I'm going to walk around with this.
OK well, we have two. Yeah all right. It is 11:30. So wrap up the last bit of your pitches. Any questions. Make sure you have a representative chosen. And if you want to start making your way back to your tables, if you guys are squeezed in, we're going to go around and start the pitches in just a minute to the controller, do you mean.
Wrapping up. I don't want to rush you. Did I mention there are prizes. We have gummy sharks for the winner. So not quite $1 million, but. Yeah all right.
Are we ready. Everyone feeling good. Feeling confident. You have your representatives chosen. All right. Hopefully, the other outcome of this session is that you'll all be much more sympathetic to hearing pitches in the future, because now you know all the work that goes into them.
All right. This group looks very confident. So we're going to start over here. All right. All right everybody. All right let's be a good audience. We're going to hear the pitches now. All right.
Thanks, Mike. And your time is now. We have 22 minutes. Two minutes. So you see everything on the board here. The problem is research workflow optimization tools. And the problem we are trying to solve is, how do we reduce the barriers to collaboration amongst the cross-functional or interdisciplinary researchers.
Because when a mathematician and a biologist come together and they are trying to do research, they don't understand each other's world. They don't understand each other's language. And when they go through that motion, there's a lot of fight, a lot of commotion. So that's the problem we are trying to solve. And what we imagine is a solution is you imagine a big digital Canvas like Miro if you have used.
So that's a Canvas where you can put your brain dump. If I'm a mathematician, is that biologist. We start dropping our papers, our data, the images we have taken, the notes we might have scribbled and using LLM and LLM is watching all of that. Of course, private LLM so that it does not get leaked, but its understanding in real time, all the data we are dumping there, all the information. And if I am that mathematician and he has done something related to biology, it translates in real time for me.
It speaks in my language and likewise it does for him. Or if there are more people, there are more collaborators. So that's what we are trying to do. Because in when it comes to the real research comes through collaboration. The real innovation comes through collaboration. New ideas emerge. And that's what we are trying to solve through this, the market, all of the researchers write globally.
So the world is our oyster there, but especially people who are looking to collaborate and as well as institutions. That's how we want to monetize it. The impact would be that of course, it will speed up communication, drive more innovation, the fields which do not get much attention if it reduces the barrier to that collaboration. It might actually get more prominence and it's good for the world.
Feasibility technology wise, we know that it's already possible economical feasibility through institutional subscriptions. We could monetize that. And the resources we need is fund for platform development, GTM and tie UPS with the institutions. So that's our pitch for the day. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. All right. Sharks questions for the group. It may be helpful for future groups. We're the ones with the money. So it's important that we understand where the audience effectively.
So just being a shark in case you like money to his head. Sorry that was just a meta note. Well thank you so much. It's hard to go first to. So I want to applaud you. And I especially liked your spokes model there. That was good work. Mike on the poster. I think you spoke to this a little bit, but I think the biggest thing that I see is that set tough market, research, optimization, workflow tools.
There's a ton out there. I like that you put a special spin on it. But I do think the biggest challenge, yes, there's a huge market for it. But what makes this different. What's the special sauce that is going to be if you can only buy one tool. Why is it this one I think is the key challenge that I see. Can you speak to that.
Yeah there are a lot of tools. Yes Google. Yes Miro. Yes but they have the whole world to care about. They don't understand researchers and they won't care. We understand that. We understand the world deeply. We understand research. We understand all the disciplines.
So that's where the context comes in. That's what will make it special. So if a researcher has to go for that one tool, that should be us. Excellent Let's hear it for this group. Any other questions from the Sharks. All right. Next, group.
Thank you. They've even got branding. Yeah, we did our best. Oh, beautiful has a meaning. Oh, yeah. All right. So, sharks. Picture this.
A young researcher attends her first big conference. She nervously gives a poster presentation on a niche topic in cardiovascular AI. Afterward, two people from different institutions approach her. One is working on early detection models, the other a grant reviewer exploring real world data applications. They chat, they exchange cards, and then nothing.
The moment fades, the spark dies in the inbox, and this happens thousands of times at every meeting we run. We design events and publish research to spark connection, but we don't actually support it. We let collaboration die in the hallway. That is why we built castalia IO, a platform that maps the hidden constellations of scholarly collaboration and keeps those moments alive. Castalia takes the data you already collect from abstract speakers, submissions, and author affiliations and turns it into a living, identity linked collaboration graph.
It shows you where your members are working, how they're connected, what ideas are clustering, and where your next editorial opportunity or special issue should be born. Think of it as your mission map. The clearest view of how your community is growing, connecting, and advancing in the field. Our special sauce. We use no new social layer, no logins, no separate platform to adopt.
We link directly to ORCID grants and institutional metadata, and we apply light AI to identify real potential collaborations, not just co-authorships or likes. You're already sitting on this data. We just show you the stars. We're seeking $250,000. We are seeking $250,000 in two society partners to bring this to life, not as another network, but as a community insight engine that strengthens your mission and elevates your members because your events and journals are the stars.
Constellation connects the cosmos. Let's make every spark count. Wow why do I think you already had this planned. All right. Sharks so you came up with that in 15 minutes. I did not, but we did. Wonderful collaboration. Collaboration?
we are the collaboration. So this is fantastic. Sold with a question in the current climate, and especially if we're looking at virtual platforms of interactions, how would kunstler capture those prints and guide our future behavior. That's what I want to capture.
What? yeah. Ask one more time. Yeah so we're talking about poster presentations and the footprint that you're capturing at an in-person meeting with diminishing budgets and a lot more virtual meetings happening now, how would you capture that footprint to make recommendations, to be able to capture the data through the different systems that already are existing through the API, and then the metadata that we can just pull out of systems like m EJP ScholarOne, they're holding all that metadata famously easy to integrate with.
But what. 250,000 is nowhere near enough. But what if a bunch of them were doing a whole bunch of enhancements. With an exception, of course. Working at a tech company, I'll say the answer is often just APIs. APIs any other questions. No, I would just say that we've clearly noted this down, so perhaps we should speak afterwards after this.
All right. Thank you very much. Nice talking to you. Where did that come from. All right. Next up, middle of the room. Who is our representative. All right, we're done here.
All right. So just following them around the room. All right. These guys. Yeah This is the slide. There's just waiting when you come in the room so you can see we haven't started.
Beautiful so researchers don't want to reproduce other people's research. But we need to know that the research that is being published by us is trusted, can be trusted and can be built upon. So how do we incentivize people publishing really high quality research. What we do is we create the reproducibility box. Box, box, ladies and gentlemen, is a highly trained AI model that can suck, that publishers can deploy alongside published journal articles to increase trust in science, and not only will it affect the publishers and their reputation, but also the individuals and institutions who will no longer like Harvard, have to fire someone for publishing a reputable.
No, that's not going to work. Irreproducible global studies. So we're really, really excited about this. We're going to start out small, right. We're going to start out by training for a specific field which is epidemiology. I can't say that word. Training on PubMed data, making sure that we have a really transparent model where people understand and trust the reproducibility itself.
Then we're going to take it and scale and think about what do we need in terms of incentives. Researchers need to be able to have a verification, a badge that says, yes, my research is reproducible. We are thinking of pitching to Clarivate to digital science. Maybe this reproducibility should become another part of that Altmetric donut. Maybe it goes alongside your site score.
Universities can have a trust seal on their website that says 99% of our research is reproducible and the robot is really cute. That's it. I love the starting small. Love the single discipline to start. See if there's legs on it. But how do you see that path and who I kind of missed.
Who is. What's your business model or who is your initial audience for those that epidemiology pilot. So starting small it means we can use data that already exists. We would need the seed money to build reproducibility, and we would be proving an area of research that is a bit sketchy. And people do have quite a significant amount of problems with reproducibility.
We would then demonstrate that value with a core set of crucial journals. We would prove with a core set of institutions that this is something that is valuable to them. And that is valuable to researchers and to trust in science. And then we would take that, and we would pitch that into someone who has a bigger resources to really scale that.
So the distribution model would be B2B or B2C to be back to the institutions. I'm just it'd be a B2B model. B2B model. Other questions. All right. Let's hear it for reproducibility.
Instead of chasing rooms in the back. Do you want to come up here. Do you want me to to you. OK, I'm coming back there. All right. Every year, we spend billions of dollars on research that creates world changing discoveries. We've got cancer breakthroughs.
There are climate solutions, AI advances. But the big scandal is that 95% of this research never reaches the public who actually funded it. It dies in these really dense academic papers that only 12 people ever read. Meanwhile, researchers are desperately needing career advancement, but they're struggling to show their broader impact for tenure. And then publishers are losing relevance as the public turns to TikTok for science and very often, fake science instead of the real academic research that is legitimate.
So our solution is bridge. So picture this a researcher gets their paper, accepted. Our AI immediately interviews them about what excites them most. It transforms their work into compelling stories for different audiences. It connects them with proven communicators in their field, including lay communicators who can help really connect this to more public audiences.
It generates social content, it can create infographics to help things resonate, and also media pitches. And it will automatically capture all of this information in a tenure portfolio with impact metrics that they can use to create tenure packets. Now, the business model, because I know we're all wondering, publishers are going to pay for this.
And publishers in the room, you might be like, how Why? well, let me tell you because when the research that's published with you goes viral, your journals will be must publish impact destinations. So your impact factors go up and then the subscriptions follow. We believe that researchers will, of course, also love this because it will help with their career advancement. And then publishers.
Again, you get the prestige. We get that big splashy, that big splashy go to market. We don't often talk about with go to market with research, but it really needs help here. So our ask sharks is for $4 million initially to help capture the $25 billion scholarly publishing market. Thank you.
Thank you. Interesting questions. No, we were just giving you shit, frankly. No, the $25 billion total addressable market may be the total revenue running over all publishers, but sure. So it's what might you think your TAM total addressable market might be for this sort of solution. Basically media for.
It's a great question. And if I had more than 15 minutes, I could tell you about our answer. All right. Yeah we can ask questions. Anybody else. He's the tough shark. I love the name first of all.
So a+ for simplicity the bridge. And I love the concept. I think the biggest challenge is going to be yes, publishers need to pay for this and why. And I think it's that the trickle down philosophy that we sometimes think will work in the market, that is trickier as budgets get tighter, it's that we all like the illusion that publishers care about researchers and what they're going to do with the research.
Oh, sorry. Sorry spicy. Different panel. Different panel. So maybe equally hard question to Dustin. Just give me one example of what your pitch would be to a cash strapped publisher. So not one of the big guys about why they should serve their researchers in doing this and adopting the bridge.
Yeah, I think with that, I would honestly start with a question and ask them about the biggest paper that they were super surprised, didn't go viral, and then ask them why they think that is. And then I lead into my pitch. Nice all right. Last but not least, ethical AI and peer review. Thank you.
So hello. My name is Paul. And as we all bias and fairness is like a growing issue in the peer review system. And every publisher is solving their issue in a different way with their own data sets, with their own tools, purchasing different tools and building their own processes. So basically, it's a mess out there and we're going to fix that.
We need one trusted platform where everyone knows they can trust the work done in that platform, and they trust the people on that platform. So we will first help identify publishers to identify reviewers across the globe. It can never be only people from one continent, right. To make sure that it's fair across the globe. And then we guide the users to reviewers to with the help of AI, to make a good review of the work.
The reviewers claim their profile. So we know they are an actual person. The editors can actually score the work, so over time, we will build up the trust that we know. Like, OK, these people are actually doing a good job, and these may be doing less good of a job. And like building every community Facebook, LinkedIn, we need some investment to actually build the community before we can make our own money.
I think this is quite a big opportunity. We start with the publishers because they're the issue is most stringent there, and they're probably most willing to invest. But there's definitely an opportunity to grow, to publish not only publishers, but also funders in the end, not for peer review, but they also want to trust their reviewers to see who's. Eligible to receive the funds.
Yeah, that's all about it. So let's have a coffee after this and I'll share my bank details. Thank you. So Paul. What's the ask. Is it a venture case or is it another angel strapped model that you're looking at here.
What are we looking for. Yeah what's your plan. To get to $100 million in R.N. That's what you need for the venture case. So if there's no answer to that then you're a small seed case. So again, two 100 million R.N. Yeah in a 5 to seven years. Easy question.
Sorry easy question. Yeah we don't know yet. Any other questions. All right. Amazing pitches. Let's see if I can find my way through here. Back up to the front. What?
we are going to go through the Sharks now. The sharks are going to make their individual recommendations and share some of their thinking behind why they would invest in certain pitches, et cetera. And then if we have time, we can do a little bit of sharing and ask questions of the Sharks as well. But, Dustin, you want to kick us off. Sure where am I putting my money. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to split it.
This team right here, you're going to need a lot of money. But it's really. Access and integration are the two key challenges. So the publicly available data. Fine place to start. But you really need the proprietary data that's inside publishers. And that means a ton of different systems, including Paul's including ScholarOne and some of the others.
You may be preferentially advantaged in that case, given who's at the table. But very, very exciting. This is especially events very, very hot sort of place that is a revenue driver. And so something where you actually could sell into that group both a value add. And potentially some B2B, B2C plays. And then the group in the back, we did give you shit, but I love the idea.
You could do it very capital light 4 million is way too much. No way. Giving you that much. Maybe 250. Ultimately looking to work with a small cohort of publishers, get the results, show the results, and trace them all the way back to a lift in something impact factor. But ideally, things like citations.
So basically sell the results instead of sell the idea. But thank you everybody. This is great. All right. Yeah I mean, honestly a big congratulations to everyone. This is not easy at all. These are some tough questions. And we gave you 15 minutes to come up with the next big ideas in publishing.
In a market that we all if we had even those ideas after a decade, none of us would probably be in this room. So great job on everything. I am also putting my money, all of my money with the bridge. Love the idea. I do think one of the ideas reasons that it appeals to me is I agree with you, Dustin, that I think this is really lightweight to get off the ground.
I think it's also really resonates with some of the key issues that we're seeing right now in scholarly publishing. We know we need to get better in terms of scientific communication. We know we need to get better at assisting researchers in telling their story to defend science, especially in the present moment. And publishers have not just a responsibility and opportunity to do this.
Even if you look at it just from a purely capitalistic perspective, if we want to keep publishing going, we're going to have to remain relevant. So I actually think this is an absolutely critical idea to do things in this regard to keep that going. So great work. You kind of both. Well, congratulations on the pitch.
So the pitch was perfect from the first group constellation right. Yeah But I have to echo my Justin and Lauren. The bridge seems like a winner in my view as well. You can get this off the ground pretty fast. Find the right investors and you can grow it to scale.
So that would be my bet as well. Yeah and you probably don't want to take anybody's money. You should do this for don't take anybody's money. It's jail. Yeah Hey, but don't ask, don't ask, don't get. So excellent pitches. Excellent pitches. Everyone and some of the things that were highlighted, like the workflow optimization as well as focus on research integrity.
We know these are critical to our daily livelihood. But at the same time, I would also like to go with the bridge. Just given the current circumstances, it's imminent that we interact with the lay public, people who are sitting on the other side of the fence to be able to communicate what we are doing, how we're bringing about the needed difference friends and how they should collectively support our industry for us to survive.
But I would applaud you for your pitch. Maybe you want to hire these guys for communication pitch. And also, I like the growth mindset. So go for whatever you're asking for because you have four sharks behind you now. Yeah all right. Thank you so much. Sharks we do have a few minutes for questions. If anyone has questions or if you want to share anything that kind of surprised you in the process, or that you learned in the process, or that you might take away from this.
Everyone knows everything about investing now. Great OK. All right. Well, we'll. Last, last chance. So So the bridge. Please help yourself to some shark gummies. Thank you everyone so much for coming.
I hope you had fun. Yeah have a good rest of the meeting.
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The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
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