ResearchGate, the professional network for scientists, today announced its acquisition of scholarz.net, a reference management, knowledge management and academic network based in Würzburg, Germany. Financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed yet.
Both companies were founded in 2008. In the case of scholarz.net, this company is a spin-off of the interdisciplinary research project “Scientific Work in the Web” by two German scientists (Update – March 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
Scholarz’s co-founder and CEO Koch feels optimistic that with this acquisition they have found the best possible new home for their users: “With its two million users, ResearchGate is a widely recognized among the global scientific community. This gives me the confidence that our users will continue to enjoy the best service possible.”
Koch initially had the idea to develop the software when he started working on his dissertation; he needed a tool to organize his research effectively and to share information with colleagues. Since then thousands of researchers have used Scholarz over the past few years to increase the speed and quality of their work.
Dr. Ijad Madisch, CEO and co-founder of Berlin-based ResearchGate is equally delighted about the acquisition: “We’re happy to welcome scholarz.net users to ResearchGate. On our network they will find new opportunities for global scientific collaboration and new ways to build their reputation interactively and in real-time.”
Scholarz.net will be discontinuing its services come January 10, 2013. The platform’s users are requested to back-up all files they have stored on scholarz.net and to open a new account at ResearchGate. A simple-to-use export tool has been provided for this purpose.
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