More connective tissue may make academia more efficient
GIVEN journalists' penchant for sticking the suffix “gate” onto anything they think smells of conspiracy, a public-relations consultant might have suggested a different name. But ResearchGate, a small firm based in Berlin, is immune to such trivia. It is ambitious, too—aiming to do for the academic world what Mark Zuckerberg did for the world in general, by creating a social network for scientists. And it is successful. About 1.4m researchers have signed up already, and that number is growing by 50,000 a month.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Professor Facebook”
From the February 11th 2012 edition
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