Decentralizing Research Towards “Open Academia” - Tokyo 2024

okay and for our next guest we have Rios shabat um from academist Inc and uh Rios will be discussing decentralizing research towards open Academia um and about 10 years of academics and Beyond in English thank you um first of all uh thank you for uh giving my me to sharing a vision open Academia so I'm academist and today uh I have been um introduced our vision and Service uh 20 minutes okay so do you know academist academist oh thank you okay so let's search academist on your browser and find your favorite project yes there are a lot of uh researchers in academies so yeah let check hi yes okay and today I'd like to talk about why we need open Academia which of a vision and after that 10 years of academist and finally a decentralized research institute this is our Milestone to realize our vision okay um when I was a PhD student uh about 15 years ago uh I major in theoretical physics and so uh I like research but I also fa the sense of discomfort so we have almost no chance to know uh um what the lab next door was doing so I thought something was wrong so now that I think about it um this is a culture that I now call Clos Academia in gradate problem uh I have a chance to visit Silicon Valley and I met a lot of PhD students um and they are building connections uh with diverse stakeholders based on their research and being inspired I came back to Japan and I started organizing intering uh meetups where graduate student uh from different fields come together I realized that it is difficult to understand the research details of course but I can understand the research Vision it's very uh interesting and my find so if we create a site where research um Vision a Gaz uh research will be able to connect with diverse stakeholders so I started academist yeah so the original plan was to learn a media platform where researchers could present the appeal of their research however uh it did not meet the needs of researchers at all because they are very busy yeah so so gradually we come across Cloud funding as a good means to provide researchers with incentive and returns for their Outreach while enabling a wide audience to know and support researchers at that time uh crowd funding for research was not considered the funding option but we kept going and this year uh we reached the 10th anniversary of our service okay so our vision is um realize open Academia so what is open Academia uh I'd like to characterize the current state of Academia as largely a closed Academia uh in close Academia uh research is mainly found by public money uh which lead to the distance between supporters namely uh taxpayers and researchers and researchers tendency to appeal their research vision and primary to government Founders and finally and Main recipients of the research output being limited to peer researchers in our view such a cross culture of Academia has led to many problems uh researchers lack the freedom of pursure their own interests and Society misses the opportunity to fully appreciate the value of research on the other hand of Academia relies on diverse source of funding and that enables uh various means through which people and researchers interact and researchers sharing their Vision with the public and the outcome of the research being shared with blood stakeholders this this a kind of Academia we should build in next era and if we look back on the history of Academia uh we can see an alternation between closed and open mode in 16th through 18th century a new technology called uh printing press helped open up Academia by uh liberating Knowledge from Closs universities we believe that same thing should happen in the 21 century uh driven by the information technology so with that Vision what we have done in the past 10 years uh currently our activities consist of three main periods academics crowd funding and academ fun club and the Grant I will briefly explain first the two okay uh we started academic crowd funding in 2014 this was the time when finding in general was becoming popular uh for example Kickstarter and indigogo in the US and start around 2018 to 9 and in Japan ready for and kick camp fire began their services around uh 20 11 12 so academist was the first platform dedicated to Academia in Japan so uh we choose sorry we choose or noing model where you set a Target among amount and only receive the funds if you reach the Target because we believe committing to the Target is important part of the process so let me show some example uh first is the S crow research project by asist to understand the mechanism of high right rink form forms by observing gamma rates emitted from a S Cloud uh this was such a Noel approach that they could not receive um Public Funding uh that's Kaki in Japanese uh granting aid for scientific research in Japan so they tried crowdfunding and able to begin their project and with their initial success they later received Public Funding so crowd funding means a 0 to one Public Funding a one to 10 or 100 so this is a model case of crow funding reading to A significant scientific impact so next was um interdis project that use Game Theory and machine learning to analyze the game OB suer in a no way a project like this is appealing to supporter because the impact is easy to imagine to supporter okay so um here is a comparison between Public Funding and crowd funding and I want all um won't go over all of them but important point is that um it's not a either or a choice between crowd funding and public funds like K here so the largest difference is that in Cloud funding uh we can create a rout where researchers and supporters communicate directly this non monetary aspect of crowdfunding is critical in realiz of Academia we think and in Cloud funding such communication tends to be one shot um however we real that supporters want to be continuously updated on the progress of the project to make the relationship longer we started a fun Club system so in the fun Club supporters contribute few hundred Yen or a few dollars a month so the researchers intern report so their report can be about their daily activities rather than about the research progress this way supporters get to know deeper about the researcher as a person since funer support is small in terms of the amount of money we came up with a scheme where fun Club is paired with the price format program the price is supported by the industry Partners in this price uh we implemented quadratic boting like mechanism as some of you may be familiar it involves Gathering a matching Poof from companies and distrib distributing funds based on the number of supporters rather than the total amount of support okay so what have we accomplished uh we launched uh over 300 project uh partnered with researchers from um 189 universities to ear uh 27,000 supporters with total PR money amounting to 3.1 million yen so Cloud crowd funding culture is clearly taking Loot and we proved that linear glut is possible and if you look at the impact of the crowdfunding uh 34 researchers have acquired approximately 270 million yen from other fing sources this means academist worked as an initiator of a project that's a 0 to one um so that rater acquires larger funds and also it is worth noting that that crowd funding enable collaboration with diverse stakeholders two third of researchers collaborated with non researchers stakeholders such as companies media uh educational sectors and so on so in the past 10 years we have learned that uh crowd funding is more about connecting researchers with people than about connecting money with project another thing we learned is the importance of of research relations research relations or real is a skilled person who help researchers blush up their visions and help find supporters and or funds by supporting hundreds of projects Academy teim has come to excer at this real function and um yeah this is our um Vision uh one of the vision uh decentralized Research Institute and croud funding was a way to decentralize research funding the current model uh typically matches one or few researchers with SE supporters however uh research is inh a team effort the next step is to realize an autonomous and decentralized formation of research teams supporters and research relations themselves this is our concept of decentralized research institute I'd like to roughly Define the decentralized research institute as um having diverse funding sources where Public Funding is not the majority and consisting of not so large teams up to about uh 50 people being open to collaboration with other Institute the third aspect is CR uh critical for our vision so here is a left sketch of what the centralized Research Institute looks like there are researchers and supporters gathers uh from the public and uh yeah and each specialist and in it uh Rel staff plays a key Ro in binding the project yes in the later case um B impacts enable further expansion of The Institute so um in the future uh we need to build uh what is most critical impact so now we Define academic impact economic impact and medor impact so we uh rearrange uh what impact is more better to um sustainable model so how do we make this happen so as a milestone toward our vision we are launching the Thousand true funds project in the first phrase of academic spites and seven young researchers were newly selected for this initiatives so team academist and these researchers will work together with a large number of funds that will support the project sustainably so through this initiative academist aims to boost its capability capability as a real so developing The crucial skills of identifying promising research and determining in um research uh compatibility so this project we believe it's the first step toward envisioning an open Academia we the centralized Research Institute for we wish to read this movement okay to summarize uh we believe that the difficult mod of 21 century Academia must be open Academia so crowdfunding is more about about connecting researchers with people than about connecting money with project research relations Rel is uh critical yet but uh under B function uh decentralized Research Institute as next Direction toward open Academia okay finally uh we have a lot of collaborators and Co member and plus 400 researchers uh our team and shareholder a lot of shareholder um about 50 15 shareholders and C Partners there a lot of universities and private supporter like this so uh we want to expand our team um more larger in in the future so if you are interested in our service uh so please contact me so especially uh you have any ideas to um material rights decentralized Research Institute and are interesting supporting us if financially and want to join us as academic team member as a real yeah so thank you very [Applause] much okay so we have about five minutes for questions if anybody has any questions to ask anybody okay thank you very much for the uh excellent talk um I'm curious that uh the kind of um the benefit of using like qu think funding uh your point of view as a kind of um this um crowd funding system because um so you already have like you know bunch of the um system that everybody already can you know supporting scientific project and how how what what's the kind of um the kind of additional value of qu using CTIC funding in your perspective would you explain that if you have okay uh uh uh you mean um supporters Merit I know research Merit to use crowd funding no what I mean is like you have additional vales using this okay yeah thank you um if uh your researchers um maybe you think that uh okay um I need money uh 10000 Yen I need but I choose uh crowdfunding or a public fund or company's fund maybe um um more option so by using crowdfunding uh you can connect a lot of stakeholder this is um the most important Point by using crowdfunding so for example um before crowdfunding uh we don't know um uh who who you um who connect you but after crowdfunding uh maybe you can give a lot of message from uh stakeholders uh for example um researchers are interesting uh some BS and some BS um um maybe researchers um I like this bags but um uh nobody uh like this bags but some company uh may be interested in bags and so Foundation um may be interested in this back so this Innovation will happen by using Cloud funding so I think this um um this uh um increase the uh probability is important to using Cloud funding so okay okay I think it's um answer is uh similar answer yeah okay thank you okay we have about two minutes left if there's any more questions okay H sh thank you very much for 10 years efforts on this field um I'm very curious on the core value of the s academist maybe it's relating to the science relation uh so research relations uh capabilities in your company and uh could you please explain about what kind of characters uh or capabilities necessary for the science uh Rel uh sorry research relations okay thank you yeah and we are now uh considering uh the definition of uh re RS yeah so but first of all uh I think very important to uh know the academic situation so I think a PhD holder uh it is easy to adjust the real yeah so Academia to business side is very good for real but on the other hand it's a little bit difficult to business side Academia because to learn the academic culture uh I think it's like uh um not so easy yeah because a very complicated um uh uh um environment in Academia yeah so I think um for examp pH holder is very um good to yeah adjust the real function but we need to Define um real uh more yeah um in the future you mean that the understanding of the culture of Academia is very key to be a re Rel relation researcher relations but what kind of uh not only understanding but what kind of adding value or capabilities is necessary as a uh re research relations in your company yeah I think um to know both academic and Industry and make um story uh connect each other story yeah yeah so I think um maybe um we don't make um manual yeah so we uh approach uh one by one yeah and academic and each industry we make a story and appeal the researcher to the industry and make some new value yeah now I understood thank you thank you okay everybody can we get a round of applause for ruk shab thank you so much [Applause]