ResearchGate, based out of Berlin and Cambridge, Mass., is one of a handful of large academic social networks that is trying to help researchers around the world connect and collaborate. Another example is Mendeley, which got got bought by Elsevier (see disclosure) a month ago, to the consternation of many users.

ResearchGate has previously had A and B funding rounds, where we knew who was involved (Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners typically feature) but didn’t know the amount. This time, we know the amount but not who bought the equity.

Apart from connecting people, ResearchGate also lets researchers treat their profiles as personal webpages for the purposes of republishing papers they have written. This effectively provides a way around the copyright restrictions that frequently irk academics (after all, most of this research is publicly funded), allowing ResearchGate to act as an open access repository for published papers. Users can also share experiment-derived raw data with one another.

ResearchGate recently started trying to make money, offering the eyeballs of its 2.7 million users to recruiters and conference promoters. It’s a safe bet that the money raised in the last week or two will at least partly go towards boosting the company’s sales force.

UPDATE (8am PT): This article has been updated to remove the suggestion that ResearchGate acts as an open access repository for published papers while Mendeley does not. In fact, Mendeley does offer similar functionality.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

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Perhaps it’s no surprise for the Harvard-trained virologist, who traded in a promising medical research career to launch the social network for scientists. But still, in a world where the impact of social networks is usually measured by how many news headlines they can generate, he prefers success stories that have a more direct impact.

Take the example of Rafael Luque, a chemistry professor at the University of Cordoba in Spain. Luque found a collaborator on ResearchGate that he’d have never come across in the real world: a post-graduate student in the Philippines called Rick Arneil Aracon. After using the site to connect and discuss some ideas, together they discovered a novel new method of helping to make biofuels from the leftovers of corn cobs.

The technology is still in development, but it’s evidence of real impact for the site — and a hint at the substantial change that’s happening in the way scientists can work online.

“When we started, people told me you have to get all of the big professors on board,” says Madisch, as we sit in the company’s Berlin headquarters.

His answer was precisely the opposite.

“No,” he says. “If you get all the people who will be professors then it will succeed. We have people who joined four years ago who now say they use ResearchGate for communication in their lab: that’s what I want.”

It’s been a big few weeks for the network, which recently announced that it had broken the two million user barrier. That marks a serious milestone, even if it seems small in comparison to the billion citizens of the United States of Facebook.

It may be dwarfed by Zuckerberg’s empire, but Madisch and his team — including former Facebooker Matt Cohler, who sits on the company’s board — think that they can punch way above their weight with a much smaller community. Why? Because their couple million users are all professional scientists and academics who are all trying to change the world.

So what’s next?

“The next big thing,” says Madisch, “is reputation.”

“We want to try out a community review system: I’ve had it in mind for years now, and I want to see if people will accept this way of reviewing data and sharing data.”

In the end, he wants ResearchGate to be a place where researchers publish their papers, make their full results accessible and gather reputation. That in turn, he thinks, could make the site’s ratings a reference for outside funders, governments and the science community at large.

“My goal is that at one point I’ll talk to the larger funding agencies, and if they are accepting our score at some point, every scientist can think ‘should I publish in Nature and pay a lot of money for it and only get reputation for part of the data I created’ or ‘should I publish it all on ResearchGate and get reputation for everything?’.”

Most German startups are ‘shit’

It’s a big ambition, and one that goes way beyond the scope of many German internet startups — many of whom are happy to coin it in with clones or copycat services.

This is a problem, says Madisch, and he doesn’t mince his words: whether or not unoriginality is ethical, he believes the fact that so German startups are built by MBAs rather than passionate experts is dragging the country’s web scene down.

“Most of it is shit,” he says. “If you look at the people who are founding companies in Germany, you have many people who come from the business world, and they think as business guys: What models exist? What can I do efficiently the same way without changing a lot? If you look at other countries, especially the U.S. or England, the people are coming from the industries: they know what they’re doing.”

He feels particular kinship with the other exciting consumer-focused startups graduating out of Berlin’s over-hip scene: the likes of Soundcloud and Gidsy. They are building services that do new things, not copying the examples set elsewhere — and they have a lot to share with each other.

“We talk to each other,” he says of the cadre of CEOs now operating in the city. “We talk and we meet regularly for coffee or dinner, we’re somehow in constant conversation if we need something or if we think we should talk at some point.”

Still, ResearchGate has benefited from the clone culture, albeit indirectly: it hired a significant number of staff members from StudiVZ, the Facebook copycat that imploded spectacularly earlier this year. Their loss is his gain, and it’s perhaps a sign of what might come after a generation of engineers graduate from building copies and start branching out on their own.

But while a big vision may be unusual for Berlin, ResearchGate is not alone in its ambitions to upturn the stuffy and defensive world of scientific publishing.

Mendeley, another scientific startup with German origins, is also trying to use data to disrupt the existing academic structures.

However, the fact that there are two major rivals in Europe both around the same size is not a concern to Madisch.

“I’m more afraid of the ones coming than the ones who exist already,” he says. “And I’m more concerned about what the publishers will do in the future than really having competitors in the online world.”

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“When I first met [board member and partner at Benchmark] Matt Cohler, he asked what I really wanted to do,” he says.” I explained that my goal is to win a Nobel Prize.”

And he’s not kidding. The Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist put a fast track medical career on hold in order to concentrate on building a website that he hopes can change the face of science. The reason is simple.

“I was on my way to becoming a professor, I’d published a lot,” he tells me, speaking from the company’s headquarters in Berlin. “But I noticed that I wanted more. Sure, I could be changing one discipline, but I wanted to change more than that… and I think if you can make it easier to share research, then it can change the world.”

In the simplest terms, ResearchGate is referred to as “Facebook for scientists” — a social network where professional researchers can share their work, communicate with each other and ask questions. But because it focuses on sharing knowledge, rather than activity, it’s probably got more in common with the likes of Quora or Stack Overflow.

And it’s proven very popular, with 1.4 million users from around the planet, sharing ideas and talking to each other about their work in fields from biology to physics to social science. By asking questions of each other, scientists are able to identify the academics who can help them, and perhaps avoid constantly reinventing the wheel.

“People tend not to share information on experiments that didn’t work,” says Madisch. “It means we end up making mistakes that other people have made already.”

The ability to learn from each other is what has driven ResearchGate’s popularity — and that popularity is something that has convinced investors including Founders Fund, which has just formally announced its participation in a series B round. Although the amount of money is not being disclosed, it comes on top of previous funding from the likes of Benchmark and Accel.

They all see value in a service that can capture the collaborative trend in a huge industry that — by and large — remains stuck in silos.

Online collaboration in science may still be in its infancy, but it is a powerful, growing trend — driven by the same technologies that underpin social networking and business collaboration. In a story last year, I spoke to several people who were at the cutting edge of ‘open science’, a loose movement trying to break down some of the barriers and take advantage of the online tools now available.

The internet, now an indelible part of our lives, allows like-minded individuals to seek one another out and share vast amounts of raw data. Researchers can lay claim to an idea not by publishing first in a journal (a process that can take many months) but by sharing their work online in an instant.

And while the rapidly decreasing cost of previously expensive technical procedures has opened up new directions for research, there is also increasing pressure for researchers to cut costs and deliver results. The economic crisis left many budgets in tatters and governments around the world are cutting back on investment in science as they try to balance the books. Open science can, sometimes, make the process faster and cheaper, showing what one advocate, Cameron Neylon, calls “an obligation and responsibility to the public purse”.

And given the trillions of dollars pumped into scientific research each year, it is perhaps no surprise that investors think ResearchGate is on the threshold of a major opportunity. But still, there is a serious question about how the site makes the sort of money that venture funds require — a point made recently in a piece in The Economist which dubbed Madisch “Professor Facebook.”

At the moment, most of those users are in their 20s. Their favourite activity is to ask each other questions about practical research problems, from DNA-sequencing techniques to statistical tricks. They are also busy reading each other’s papers: more than 10m have been uploaded.

Scientists whose reputations are established may be more hesitant, though, and not just because they are set in their ways. Science is not only about collaboration but also about competition. This limits what people are willing to share.

So far the company has been paid to build out some private versions that can operate behind the firewall inside institutions, and it is also looking into the possibility of job listings, reputation management and contextual advertising as revenue streams.

Board member Simon Levene, who is a venture partner at Index but put independent angel money into the company in its previous funding round, says that he sees a great opportunity to shake things up.

“The reason I fell in love with ResearchGate is that, in my opinion, the market for academic research in science is broken and ripe for disruption,” he says. “The dream of the web for Tim Berners-Lee was to allow researchers to collaborate, but the irony is that it hasn’t worked out that way.”

Madisch accepts that not everybody is convinced — many scientists simply refuse to share their knowledge, since they need to boost their own careers in order to receive funding. But like any good researcher, the 31-year-old relies on data to back up his response. Yes, the user base is young, but it’s skewing older as time goes on.

And then he pulls out a piece of anecdotal evidence to show precisely what he means.

“When I started ResearchGate, I was in Germany and my professor — 62 years old and a distinguished academic who has published more than a thousand papers — wouldn’t let me divide my time between research and the company,” he says. “He didn’t believe that scientists would do this, that they would share their ideas and answer questions about their work.”

“Six weeks ago I noticed that he’d signed up for ResearchGate.”

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