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Platform provides overview of startups fighting Covid-19

Initiative aims to connect government, research departments and small businesses in the fight against coronavirus

The Dutch startup facilitator Techleap has launched an overview of 155 businesses that are working to beat Covid-19. The startups have been added to the ScienceFinder platform, which was created by Techleap last month in collaboration with several universities and research organisations.

The publicly accessible platform holds information on what scientists in the Netherlands are working on and what they have published so far, as well as information about startups. The goal is to make it easier for government and industry to find their way to research departments and small businesses that are active in certain fields or might have information relevant to them.

The platform is maintained by the company IDfuse, which also provides universities with advice and training on determining and predicting the social impact of research.

“Dutch science is held in high esteem, but making the knowledge generated applicable is still quite a challenge,” said Paul Tuinenburg, director of IDfuse. “ScienceFinder can help to make academic knowledge more accessible.”

ScienceFinder uses three data sources: the NARCIS database on publicly funded research projects and scientific publications; the databases of the NWO research council and the EU; and information collected by IDfuse itself on academic startups from universities’ knowledge transfer offices.

The platform shows abstracts of scientific articles with links to either an open-access repository or journals that make articles available for a fee.

“We already offer the most complete overview of publications and startups in the Netherlands,” Tuinenburg said. “But it could be even better if the universities wanted to share more information with us from their own systems. That’s why we invite everyone to share more data sources with us, so that the database gets even more coverage.”

ScienceFinder also makes it easier to find out which scientists and startups are involved in a particular breakthrough technology or are working on proof of concept for a particular technology, as now in relation to Covid-19. The database contains references to 422,000 publications and information on 120,000 research projects and 364 academic startups.