This startup aims to democratise access to research and amplify the voices of scientists

As a journalist, when looking for research, I’m often confronted by walled research journal articles that I’d love to read but simply can’t afford. I can email the author but rarely receive a response. 

The reality is that access to academic work is restricted to those with the means to pay, primarily universities, large research institutes, and corporations. 

But now, a research curation startup has found a way to open access to academic research. 

Proemial is building an open platform called Proem that connects researchers to a larger and more diverse audience through personalised summaries of the latest research papers. The mission is to make it easy to read, discuss, understand and engage with recent discoveries — and the researchers that produce them.

The company was founded in late 2023 by Mads Rydahl, an AI entrepreneur and the first Head of Product and Design at Siri; Geet Khosla, a serial entrepreneur, deep tech investor, and advisor; and tech veteran Brian Pedersen.   

I spoke to CEO Geet Khosla to find out more. 

What’s the point of writing research no one reads?

Following several years of entrepreneurship and which was included two successful experts, time as an Advisor at Antler, mentor at Rockstart, and member of the National Advisory Board at Pioneer Centre for AI, Khosla started a venture studio to help scientists build companies.  

He shared: 

“I didn’t care so much about corporates, I just wanted to focus on the natural scientists. I also learned that being a scientist is hard, especially in Europe.  

The IP law is just so fucking arcane.”

During two years of discovery, Khosla met over 600 international researchers   doing what he calls “Insane work.”

“I get a little emotional about it because I went to a lab in Poland and saw a Pakistani professor who was the head of a lab.

 He essentially has cured Alzheimer’s with early intervention with a VR headset with a specific light strobe, which essentially lights up parts of your brain that fight Alzheimer’s.

I was thinking to myself, ‘Why aren’t you on the Time Magazine cover? Like, what’s going on? Why is an Indian actor showing up on the AI cover of Time and not you?’ And he’s like, ‘We’re just a small lab with a small budget.”

He also realised that not all scientists want to be celebrities or entrepreneurs; many “just want to do the science.”

When he asked a researcher, ‘You spend years on research, but how many people actually read your papers?’ The answer was a sobering two. 

Inspired by this stark reality, he co-founded Proemial. 

The platform aims to democratise access to research, connecting researchers with a broader audience beyond academia. 

As Khosla puts it, ‘Scientists aren’t bloggers or podcasters. Proem offers a more efficient way to share their work with the world.'”

The free knowledge platform answers user questions backed by scientific research papers and leverages AI to summarise the findings in plain language, helping non-experts easily understand and share even complex knowledge. This means anyone, from students to journalists and enterprises, can access the latest scientific findings. 

How does Proem access research for free? 

In talking to researchers, Khosla discovered an open secret in academic publishing that is ripe for exploitation (my word, not his).

Research papers are available in pre-print form for peer review for a period of time:

“Sometimes it can take 4-6 months, and at times more than a year, for them to be peer-reviewed and end up behind a paywall or in open-access.”

The startup takes papers from open servers and pre-prints and turns their findings into plain-language summaries, and provides links to the paper in the publication with full author attribution. 

The need for open source access research

At the risk of hyperbole, I hit yet another academic publication paywall; I often think back to Web 2.0 efforts to open source academic research, such as the efforts of hacker and digital activist Aaron Swartz. In 2011, 

Swartz was accused of stealing more than 4 million articles from a computer archive at MIT. 

Swartz’s indictment said he stole the documents from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitised copies of articles from academic journals. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites for free. Aaron Schwartz committed suicide in 2013. 

And there’s a reason why researchers don’t reply to my emails requesting a free copy of their paper —according to  Khosla, if they want to provide open access, the researcher has to pay €10,000 per submission for it to be free to readers. 

Fortunately, things are improving, and an unexpected country is leading the way — Sweden. 

Sweden has been supportive of open-access publishing. In 2017, the Swedish government set a goal for all scientific publications resulting from publicly funded research to be openly available by 2026.

In Sweden, copyright law generally grants authors the initial ownership rights to their academic works. This means that researchers and scholars typically own the copyright to their papers, theses, and other scholarly publications by default when they create them.

This means the author holds the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, and make their work available to the public.

So things are changing, but until then, there’s Proem. 

The science behind the news

Proem is also today launching the scientific annotation tool, ‘Proem News’. It that allows anyone to get scientifically backed insights into the subject of any relevant news article. 

The goal is to ensure a more objective and in-depth discourse around any news, particularly now in the heated climate around the US election.

Kholsa asserts: 

“The US Presidential Election is one of the World’s most important elections. There was no doubt in our mind that we needed to use our Proem platform, which is built on a foundation of scientific research, to enrich the news about this election with science.

A debate grounded in trustworthy information, which science is at the core of, is the only way to sustain an open and fair democracy.”

Anyone can paste a URL to any news story into the Proem News tool and within seconds, an AI scrapes Proem’s index of over 240 million of research papers to find the most relevant sources for highlighting the article’s subject. The enriched article is presented with a short factual

background referencing the ten research papers. Following the factual background is a question field, where any question asked will be answered also referencing a specific research paper.

“Providing references ensures that our users can go straight to the source, whether to read the full research paper or to validate the credibility. This is where the magic is because it allows for critical thinking and ensures the transparency and depth people don’t get from traditional news articles” explains Khosla.

A new platform for researchers to connect with the public

Khosla admits their platform is controversial but stresses, “What we’re trying to focus on is really giving the authors credit. We offer a summary and link to the original publication with full author attribution.” 

“Researchers are also getting a new audience that they wouldn’t get otherwise.”

Unlike academic research publications where interaction is limited to letters to the editor,  Proem allows readers to ask questions for researchers, expanding their audience and gaining meaningful engagement from people genuinely interested in their work. 

The company funds its activities through monetised research curation, much like a digital archivist prioritising up-to-date research. 

The company plans to make the platform offer papers in different languages in the future. 

In December last year, the company raised €2 million in an investment co-led by People Ventures and Dreamcraft Ventures. It was supported by a group of angel investors and advisors from Apple, Google, and Meta, including academic luminary Serge Belongie from The Pioneer Centre for AI in Copenhagen. Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, served as an advisor. 

Proem has attracted strong industry attention  — as Khosla notes, “You want to stay up to date within your sector and what your contemporaries are doing — from companies such CERN, Novo Nordisk, Alphabet, Meta, Cornell, and Amazon.

The company is also close to collaborating with the MIT Sloan School, and I think Swartz would be proud of that.  

Lead image: Proemial. Photo: uncredited.