Newgen Knowledgeworks, a digital publishing platform and technology developer specializing in the academic markets, has released ResearchPad, a tablet app that aggregates Open Access research articles. Developed for Apple and Android tablets, the ResearchPad app/digital reader aggregates more than 250,000 Open Access articles available to read for free.
The app offers such features as a digital reader, full text search, and a publisher/author dashboard with analytics on who is reading what. ResearchPad allows publishers to add enhanced content to their articles, including video or interactive quizzes, and there’s a real-time listing of the most popular works in a particular subject category. Users can synch across multiple devices—although the app is currently limited to tablet devices and some larger Android smartphones like the Samsung Note 4.
ResearchPad makes Open Access content accessible globally, manages passwords, offers social media sharing and “relevant research,” a notification feature that can be set to announce when new content relevant to a particular discipline has been added to ResearchPad’s inventory.
Maran Elancheran, president of Newgen, said the company works with academic, STM and professional publishers and is also a major technology supplier to the K-12 educational market. Newgen also offers digital conversion services and complete production workflows for print and digital production.
Newgen CTO Patrick Martinent said that while ResearchPad and its content is free to use, Newgen makes money on the project by offering a “white label” branded edition of the app. “We have a branded ResearchPad app with relevant and related content,” he said, that can be used to feature conference proceedings or other kinds of content linked to specific publisher or subject category.
Martinent called Open Access content, which features peer-reviewed research materials available for free online to the scientific community, “a growing phenomenon,” pointing out that ResearchPad will have 500,000 articles by year’s end. He emphasized that “we’ve made a commitment to Open Access. Our platform can work at that scale.”
