actúaloop, Ideas Competition for Innovation in Research Social Networks

 

 

Frontiers is a community-rooted open access publisher that has attracted over 170.000 researchers as authors and editors. By taking publishing entirely online, they drive innovations and develop new technologies to make peer review more efficient and transparent, provide impact metrics for articles and researchers, merge open access publishing with a research network platform to catalyze collaboration and research dissemination and we popularize research to the public, including children. Their mission
is to increase the reach and impact of articles and their authors. Frontiers is today the 4th largest open access publisher, has received the ALPSP Gold Award For Innovation In Publishing, and collaborates with the Nature Publishing Group and other partners to advance the global Open Science movement. One of its products is Loop, whose lema is "maximazing impact form researchers and their discoveries with network technology"

The call actúaloop Competition is part of the activities of the company FRONTIERS in collaboration with the Center of Support for Technological Innovation (CAIT) of the Technical University of Madrid.

The Technical University of Madrid (UPM) and Frontiers launch the first edition of the actúaLoop competition for entrepreneurs and technical teams. The main goal of the competition is to promote ideas which utilize the API of the Loop research network to create innovative applications around the academic and publishing industry with the support and mentoring of UPM and Frontiers.
The winner will be awarded 5.000 € and the best 10 ideas will be promoted for an incubation phase to develop them. In addition, participants can have access to business angels as well as job opportunities in an exciting multinational environment.
To participate in the competition, candidates can submit their ideas in this inscription form before 7th of January 2016. The ideas should be related to research networks, publishers and universities to create innovative products.
The products could be of any kind such as websites, mobile applications, big data applications or other tools; always within the academic or publishing industry. Some sample ideas could be:

  • Application that builds on Loop and Facebook´s APIs and to manage and recommend publications according to users´ interests and back ground.
  • Mobile application which integrates Loop and MeetUp that promotes industry-academic collaboration.
  • Use of big data to exploit publication analytics.
  • Multi-lingual support for fetching, publishing or commenting on publications.
  • Browser plugin to search for profile and publication information.
  • Access to multimedia objects for on-line replication of experiments.

Goals:

  • To discover the best talent within the University focused on developing solutions based on online academic publishing and research networks.
  • To promote new business ideas for services and applications around on-line research networking and publishing.
  • To support some of the most innovative ideas with a specific training process where both technical aspects and business support will be addressed.

Directed to:

  • The competition is open to “university teams” composed of faculty members and/or graduate students (master or doctoral students) from the Technical University of Madrid.
  • Faculty members and graduate students from other public universities in the region could become eligible in the future once they have signed an agreement with UPM for the participation in this Program.

The Competition is divided into phases: 

Phase 1. Selection and Promotion of the best ideas

  • 3 awards of 1.000€ each
  • Up to 7 non-cash awards
  • Feedback on all the submitted proposals

Phase 2. Development of the selected ideas

  • Mentoring for the selected ideas
  • “check-in” meetings with each participating team

Phase 3. Awards

  • The three best projects from phase 2 are selected as finalists.
  • 1st award: 5.000€
  • 2nd award: 3.000€
  • 3rd award: 2.000€

Phase 4. Pre-incubation services for winners

  • The Organization can provide some incubation services in order to support the technology.
  • Free access to platforms.
  • Contacts with Investment Figures, as business angels, venture capital, etc.
  • Licences for use of technology or know-how owned by UPM (or by other partner universities where applicable).
  • The possibility of job or internship offers in Frontiers.

 

Open call and acceptance of submissions until January 7th 2016
Fill online the application form here: 

For further information please read the bases of the competition:

For any questions please write to actualoop@upm.es

For more information about Loop please click here and to visit the Loop developer portal click here