Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • News
  • Published:

Social networks attempt to spark academic–industry collaborations

Nature Biotechnology volume 30, pages 901–902 (2012)Cite this article

Subjects

This article has been updated

In certain respects, the Knode model is not completely new. In addition to such databases as the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) and Elsevier's SciVerse (http://www.info.sciverse.com/what-sciverse), recent years have witnessed the development of several online services that enable not only the identification of key researchers in a certain field but also galvanize interactions among those researchers. These services, including http://www.biomedexperts.com; http://www.researchgate.net/; http://academia.edu/ and http://www.iamscientist.com/, have common themes, such as enabling researchers to share information about themselves and the data they generate, follow competitors in their field, form collaborative groups and even engage donors to fund projects.

Knode is also a social networking tool—akin to LinkedIn or Facebook—but it is specifically focused on enabling networking between translational researchers. The site provides profiles of scientists, listing their specialties, patents, grants and publications—essentially information that is publicly available data posted on the web. The company aims to have profiles from researchers both in industry and in academia. Unlike other social networks, Knode does not require scientists to opt into the service or to constantly update their profiles; the algorithms they use to scrape publicly accessibly sites for the information do this automatically. Knode is also in the process of adding additional features, including the ability for scientists to list technologies or assets they have available for licensing.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Change history

  • 06 December 2013

    In the version of this article initially published, the title “academic—university collaborations” should have read “academic—industry collaborations.” The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York

    Arlene Weintraub

Authors
  1. Arlene Weintraub
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Weintraub, A. Social networks attempt to spark academic–industry collaborations. Nat Biotechnol 30, 901–902 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1012-901

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1012-901

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing: Translational Research

Sign up for the Nature Briefing: Translational Research newsletter — top stories in biotechnology, drug discovery and pharma.

Get what matters in translational research, free to your inbox weekly. Sign up for Nature Briefing: Translational Research