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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution
• Facebook’s tactical retreat on privacy
• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past

So, now that the takeover has come to pass (the Financial Times reports the deal value as £45 million (USD $69 million), or around £20 per user), what fallout should we expect?

Cleaner data

According to Mendeley CEO Victor Henning, everything should be just fine. Mendeley will “stay an independent site” with plans to expand its 50-strong team to 80 within the next 18 months, he told me, adding that the deal would give both parties better data:

“All those resources will help us do two things. One is more integration — the biggest gap in our product offering is that it’s too difficult for users to get to full text content. When people found something on Mendeley it was usually just the metadata with a link to the publisher’s website. Elsevier publishes around 20pc of the world’s scientific output and has deals with other publishers for its Scopus database. We’ll be working to integrate Mendeley with Scopus and ScienceDirect to make it easier for our users to enrich and clean up the content we already have — our content is crowdsourced. Elsevier has a lot of clean structured data we can use to clean it up, and our data can enrich Elsevier’s because we have rich social information.

“We can now also take a more long-term perspective about monetization versus feature development and user growth. As an independent startup we were always trying to break even as soon as possible, and were under pressure to monetize new features. Now we can pick up certain things for the roadmap, for example hiring a fully-fledged mobile team. There will be a new iOS app soon, and we’re going to start building an Android app from scratch.”

Henning added that Elsevier’s existing 17 million author profiles would also have a positive effect. “Now, once we’re integrated, when you sign up to Mendeley we will immediately be able to present you with your profile to claim,” he said. “It will make it easier for users to get started.”

But what about all that criticism of Elsevier? There, Henning insisted there was little risk of users taking flight:

“People have criticized Elsevier for things they’ve done in the past but, particularly last year when they were subjected to criticism for their stance on open access publishing, they’ve taken that feedback to heart. They’ve doubled the number of open access journals that they publish. They do support open access publishing and they will expand on it in the future. Another move they made last year is, people were saying they’d like to text-mine content that you have, and they opened up to the community about that.”

Elsevier, meanwhile, also said in a blog post that Mendeley was “open, social and collaborative, and it is important to [Elsevier] that it retains all of those traits”.

“Elsevier has all the power”

However, not everyone is sounding so positive. One notable perspective is that of Jason Hoyt, Mendeley’s former R&D head and, since leaving the company, founder of open access publisher PeerJ.

Hoyt said in a post on Tuesday that Elsevier had previously hampered or outright stymied open access projects at Mendeley, including the service’s PDF preview functionality and a scheme to automatically put papers filed with Mendeley into the open access archive of the author’s institution:

“If one is honest, from a business perspective the Mendeley founders did the right thing to comply with Elsevier’s demands. My personal passions about Open Access hindered that, so no surprise it didn’t work out for more than a few years… I think that Mendeley as it stands today will continue to be useful even at Elsevier. That said, I think it will be challenging for Mendeley to become a truly transformative tool in science, which is what had originally convinced me to move from San Francisco to London four years ago.”

Meanwhile, open access blogger Mike Taylor noted that “Elsevier has all the power in the relationship” with Mendeley:

“So Mendeley say things like ‘very little will change for you as a Mendeley user’ and ‘we will continue to support standard and open data formats’, and I’m sure they believe them. But it’s dependent on the whim of Elsevier. The moment it becomes inconvenient or financially disadvantageous for them to do these things, they’ll stop.”

It will be worth keeping an eye on the user numbers of Mendeley and its main academic community rivals (such as ResearchGate) and reference management rivals (such as Zotero) to see which way the scholarly users themselves feel the wind is blowing.

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

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution
• Facebook’s tactical retreat on privacy
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Details are scarce for now, but ResearchGate and Scholarz have both blogged on the takeover.

ScholarZ’s post is the more substantive, explaining why the service will shut down its own servers on 10 January:

“We’ve come a long way, developing scholarz.net into a powerful tool for everyday academic work. Thousands of researchers have used it over the past few years to increase the speed and quality of their work. Thanks to all of you who helped make this happen.

But what’s the best for the future? How can we continue offering the best service possible to our users? We believe the way to go is to join forces and to affiliate ourselves with a network we trust. This ensures that you will continue to receive outstanding service, including constant development and a vibrant research community.”

As the post points out, ResearchGate has 2.2 million researchers or – from the perspective of ScholarZ’s users – potential collaborators. It also offers access to more than 50 million publications.

So what’s in it for ResearchGate? I’m waiting to hear back from them with a from-the-horse’s-mouth explanation, but at first glance it looks like a play for ScholarZ’s literature management capabilities.

Mendeley, which has almost as many users as ResearchGate, has come more from the research-paper management side, developing a social network of sorts on top of its desktop toolset. ResearchGate comes more from the social networking side, and it could be that ScholarZ’s software will give it a fuller arsenal for taking on its rival.

ScholarZ’s KnowledgeWorkz software engine also comes in a business edition for companies that want to set up intranets – it’s not yet clear whether ResearchGate will keep this side of the business going.

UPDATE: Nope, ResearchGate tells me it won’t be using ScholarZ’s technology, nor will it be maintaining the business edition. In addition, the company says ScholarZ came to it, looking for a new home for its users as the proprietors felt they had gone as far with the platform as they could manage – particularly given ResearchGate’s own growth.

“What comes with this take-over is a certain market consolidation, which we believe will be beneficial for the scientific community in the long run,” a ResearchGate spokesperson told me.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Facebook’s tactical retreat on privacy

With a huge front-end revamp currently in private beta, the YouTube of sound is bracing itself for a fresh push. I caught up with co-founder and product dev chief Eric Wahlforss to discuss SoundCloud’s direction and what it’s like being an ambassador for Berlin.

Meyer: What’s the main goal in the ‘Next’ revamp — to make SoundCloud prettier?
Wahlforss: Especially if you’re a consumer or curator, rather than a creator, it’s a better experience. ‘Prettier’ is one aspect — that’s definitely something we’re proud about – but we’ve learned a great deal from designing for mobile and tablets in the past two years and we’ve brought that back into the browser. SoundCloud is a web app. Chrome launched around the time we launched SoundCloud publicly [four years ago] and it set the pace for the whole industry. With Next we’re leveraging all of that stuff.

It’s a bit more social than before, right?
SoundCloud has always been a social sound-sharing platform, but it certainly becomes a lot more lightweight, easier and faster to use. We removed a couple of things and made it more direct. That started when we started designing for mobile and tablets — we realised that because of the screen size and use cases you need to think about [requiring] the fewest taps possible.

SoundCloud is a social form very similar to something like YouTube or Flickr — we try and integrate wherever it makes sense. We have a very strong integration with Facebook’s Timeline. There’s some controversy around some of those integrations now, but those are specifically around watching and reading. That’s maybe not working so well, but for sound it works really well.

It sounds like you’re going more down the consumption route there. How do you see the split between consumers and creators evolving for SoundCloud?
People like to express who they are through what they listen to — there have been services like Last.fm that paved the way for that, so there’s a much larger community of people who are comfortable with being transparent about their listening behaviour. We see that as strengthening the bond between listeners and creators.

I think that’s where our strength is — maybe, as we grow, the percentages might shift around a bit, but the creators will continue to be the core. We have platform integration with GarageBand and Ableton Live, and we have an app that just launched now, Tabletop, that has a mini version of SoundCloud built into it, so if you share something the music is part of that microcommunity.

What we’ve done with Next is broaden out into the curator space. There are two new features. Reposting — that in itself is hugely powerful. We’ve not rolled it out to a large audience yet, but we’re already seeing strong network effects. That’s going to be a huge amplifier. The other thing we’re doing is we have something called sets, and in the new [version] you can add any sound from any other user.

That goes into playlisting a bit. Do you see Spotify as a rival there?
I see SoundCloud as fundamentally a different service than something like Spotify. We’re all about creators – we maintain a direct relationship between creators and listeners. The other thing about SoundCloud is it’s about all kinds of sounds. Our fastest growing segment is actually non-music.

You mean podcasts and sound library stuff?
Sound, for me, breaks down to three things: the human voice and music – arguably the most powerful kind of sounds we have – and field recordings, noises. And all the combinations of the three. For us, the human voice as a form of expression is the thing that’s growing the fastest. We have a ton of popular radio programs and podcasts, and also artists like Snoop Dogg, who is sharing music, but also sharing half-done music and voice notes.

Where is SoundCloud going to be in two years’ time?
There are some cool things we’re working on that I can’t talk about in detail. A very strong trend is mobile, another is tablet. TV is a wildcard. When you go into your car or your home, we’d like the sound experience to be completely seamless – the vision is very much being able to carry your sound with you everywhere.

I bet the drop in data roaming costs will help you there.
That’s maybe the single biggest factor right now. Smartphones are very capable, but the single biggest factors in preventing mobile use are roaming fees and data network performance.

Are you looking at staying independent, and who do you see as competition right now?
We don’t have any direct competition at the moment. There’s YouTube, Spotify et cetera, but we don’t have anything that’s quite like what we do, in a significant sense. It’s a good position to be in.

On the independence question, we don’t have any plans to do any exit or IPO in the near future. We’re still very much focused on growing our platform and community. As a company, it feels like we’re just at the beginning of things – it’s only the last year or so that things have really shown scale.

When you go out to the Valley, do you feel like an ambassador for Berlin?
Yes, I would say so. Every day people are asking me about Berlin. I see a lot more interest in moving here than two to three years ago. We do somehow represent the scene a bit as well. Berlin for me is a little bit of a counterculture, underground, rough-entrepreneurial, half-finished, tabula-rasa situation. A bit like Silicon Valley in the Sixties where you had hippie meets tech – here it’s more like punk meets tech. A lot of those parameters come into play at SoundCloud. We’re almost like a microcosm of Berlin.

But is Berlin living up to that hype?
It’s really hard to say. Personally, for me it’s enough – if I get excited about three or four things, it feels like there’s a lot going on. There could be a ton of things happening, but if it’s not interesting it goes into the background. I was in London and thinking about that. I can say there are a few cool things in London but also here.

The only place where it’s clear we’re not there yet is the Bay Area. There they have a whole different type of infrastructure, a whole different level of financing. Here, to a large extent, the capital is still missing, but the good thing is London is close by. You can even find U.S. venture capital in the meantime.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Monetizing music in the post-scarcity age
• Flash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest
• GigaOM Euro 20: the European startups to watch

“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.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

For a while there the consensus seemed to be it was a better idea to make every online product social or build on existing platforms rather than create a separate vertical social network. However, niche networks are back, from Apple’s Ping to little startups like The Fridge.

The promise of ResearchGATE is that it’s a social network that could help real work get done well. Madisch estimates that nearly 80 percent of research is unpublished, so it’s not shared with the broader scientific community. If the scientific process could be more open and shared, researchers could collaborate with each other, reduce redundancy, and improve their work. The site today contains 500,000 scientist profiles, along with 2,600 collaborative groups and an aggregated index of 35 million scientific articles. It’s already making money through a jobs board. Madisch said he doesn’t aim to disrupt the traditional research journal model, but rather to help scientists out in the formulation phase before they publish a study. He added that down the line he’d love for ResearchGATE to publish its own “journal of negative results” (which could actually be pretty awesome).

Participants in the Series A round, led by Benchmark, were Accel Partners and angels including Simon Levene, Michael Birch, Joachim Schoss and Martin Sinner. In a phone interview, Cohler said that he felt ResearchGATE was well-positioned because it was developed out of the needs of its founders. He called scientists a “large and very important market and not well served online” and said he thought improving collaboration tools has the potential to change how research is done.

Another great science-related social web tool is Scitable, but that’s more aimed at connecting teachers and students.

Photo courtesy Flickr user NIOSH.