Impacter and Global Campus: a shared path


Published at  2024-11-10 by  Ana Rodrigues

Some of you may have seen that Impacter and Global Campus are connected in a way. Both were, for instance, sharing the same stand at the last EARMA Conference in Odense. But what is the relationship between Impacter and Global Campus? Today’s blog post is exactly about that.

Impacter started in 2017, when, after working for 5 years for universities, researchers and funding agencies (through their company IDfuse), Paul and Tijmen thought of building a tool that would highlight the most common pitfalls in the proposal. The tool would empower the grants offices to focus their support on how to fix these issues in the proposal instead of explaining them. Simultaneously it would entitle the researchers to get instant feedback whenever they wanted.

The knowledge on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence they gained with Impacter in the context of grant proposals, prompted them to use the same technologies in other contexts. The first step towards that, was the collaboration with ResearchConnect, by using the matchmaking algorithms of Impacter to find the best funding opportunities based on project descriptions. Later, in 2022, when OpenAlex beta launched their application, an index of more than 250 million scholarly works became available. Impacter started to experiment with this data and, together with ResearchConnect, did the first implementation.

Soon enough, we realized it would make sense to create a new platform that combined the publication data of OpenAlex and the matchmaking magic of Impacter. It needed to be a new platform and even a new company, because the use cases were ubiquitous and we didn't want these use cases to be influenced by the brand perception people had with Impacter – so, Global Campus was born. Since the official launch in December 2022, Global Campus is used by investors to find experts for the technical due diligence, by researchers to find the best journal to publish in and to find collaboration partners, by non-academic staff in universities to scout internally and externally and by funders and publishers to find reviewers. There are also many collaborations that use the API of Global Campus, including our partners from the very beginning, ResearchConnect and Academic Transfer.

Interested in learning more about Impacter or Global Campus? Reach out to us!