If we are talking about edutech startups in Indonesia, most of the time, the names that come to mind would be those that target K-12 education, such as Ruangguru and Zenius. But there are also companies that are targeting higher educational institutions with Neliti being one of them.

Neliti is a free-to-use website builder and content management system (CMS) that creates aesthetically pleasant web interfaces for academic content providers.

In an email interview with e27, Neliti CEO Anton Lucanus writes that the company is aiming for three different types of academic content providers: institutional repositories, academic journals, and academic conferences.

“Our users are librarians and academic journal publishers. They simply sign up to our website for free and are then provided access to a publishing management system,” he explains.

” … They can perform important steps in the creation and management of their repositories and journals, such as creating a website with their own custom domain name, managing and editing research articles, indexing their articles in databases like Google Scholar, analysing the usage of their research (views, downloads, citations, etc.), as well as a lot of other important technical capabilities that repositories and journals need,” he continues.

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Why is this solution better than the existing ones?

Lucanus begins his answer by explaining the two main types of existing solutions: free open-source solutions (such as OJS for journals or ePrints for repositories) or paid solutions (such as Silverchair for journals or Pure for repositories). But these free solutions are not user-friendly, requiring them to learn how to host and build their own websites.

“But because the users are librarians or academics, not trained web developers, the resulting websites are often ugly and riddled with bugs. Paid solutions are unaffordable to most institutions and reserved only for wealthy institutions in developed countries,” he says.

“We aim to make a free solution that is infinitely easier to use than existing free solutions yet produces infinitely more beautiful and functional repositories than even the most expensive paid software. We want even small universities in the middle of a developing country to produce more beautiful and functional websites than wealthy publishers who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their websites – how disruptive would that be? This has been a huge focus of our UI/UX team.”

Neliti also aims to completely handle the entire tech stack for its users, such as hosting, indexing content, and more. According to Lucanus, no other free software has achieved this.

“We want our users to be free from any technical burden and focus on what they’re good at [which is] publishing impactful research.”

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Academic orientation

The story of Neliti began in March 2015 when Lucanus was interning at the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta, a leading research institution in Indonesia. Founded in 1888, the government-funded institution conducts basic medical molecular biology and biotechnology research. Its founder Prof. Dr Christiaan Eijkman received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in 1929.

During his internship, Lucanus found that the institute had “an enormity of impactful data that was previously unavailable publicly.” This includes data on Japanese Encephalitis rates in Central Java and the genetic sequencing results for Indonesia’s first-ever case of Zika.

“I built the first version of Neliti as a way to deposit this data publicly, should it ever be needed by local or international health authorities. Beginning as a small repository for my laboratory only, Neliti expanded rapidly (and entirely organically) to include over 1,000 other institutions and receive millions of monthly users,” Lucanus explains.

“We are trying to solve access to scientific knowledge. A lot of important scientific knowledge is hidden behind paywalls or sometimes not available online at all! We believe that research is key to solving the world’s biggest challenges and that scientific knowledge is so vital that it deserves to be free. By providing free tools that help with publishing and accessing knowledge, our mission is to improve accessibility to scientific knowledge and move one step closer to an open-access world.”

In developing the platform, Neliti started by conducting ideation on what solutions our users need.

“We then review about 100 websites/platforms with such solutions – both in the academic industry and outside – to see trends and use cases. Our UI/UX team then creates a design and UX that aims to improve on all previous solutions. We then ship it to our CTO and development team, who begin work on JIRA and handle the entire development side,” Lucanus says.

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As a platform, compared to many other startups operating in Indonesia, Neliti has a very specific target audience. Interestingly, the company has not made any particular acquisition moves to secure its customers.

“All customers have come to us organically (e.g. via word-of-mouth) – that is, 1,000 institutions and 3,000 journals. And the demand is only growing, so our existing resources are spent catering to this demand rather than trying to increase it. It’s a good problem to have!” Lucanus says.

The year of expansion

From its base in Jakarta, Neliti is currently run by a team of seven that includes Lucanus himself. The company is largely bootstrapped but has received equity-free grants from both the Indonesian and Australian governments.

“We may aim to raise capital in the future when we are ready to take things to another level,” Lucanus says.

One might wonder how a platform with a strong academic orientation such as Neliti monetises. According to Lucanus, it monetises through various advertising opportunities –from banners to sponsored content- and through the provision of essential tools in the publishing workflow.

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“For example, we offer a digital object identifier (DOI) registration feature, where users have to pay for every article that they register. DOIs are a unique code that almost all modern academic articles have; it is really important and stores all the metadata for that article,” Lucanus explains.

“They are particularly important in the academic citation because they are more permanent than URLs, ensuring that readers can reliably locate the article’s source as journal articles can often be found on multiple different websites and databases. Think of it like every book’s’ ISBN’ on its barcode. Unfortunately, registering DOIs is a cumbersome process fraught with technical difficulties that laymen just cannot understand! We handle that entire DOI registration process and charge our users for it.”

The company is also looking forward to implementing more business models, such as premium features and plagiarism checking.

Now that they have secured their place in the Indonesian market, Neliti is looking forward to expanding its business to other markets.

“We are currently really popular in Indonesia and have worked with almost every major Indonesian institution. In 2023, we want to focus on expanding geographically to other developing countries. We’ve already received some users from other developing countries, including Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and dozens of others. We’re a bit spoilt for choice on which countries to focus on, and the early part of 2023 will be focused on an expansion strategy,” Lucanus closes.

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Image Credit: Neliti

The post How Neliti aims to help improve accessibility to scientific knowledge in Indonesia appeared first on e27.