SSP Shark Tank Recap: Investing in Scholarly Publishing

There’s been many new startups, the formation of the Scholarly Publishing Angels for angel investments, and growth investments from external VC funds. Since that time, however, the topic of funding in scholarly publishing has become increasingly urgent, substantial, and notedly less fun.

So we tried to instill a little fun into what is now a very serious topic, with the help of a “shiver” of shark panelists:

• Dr. Chhavi Chauhan, Founder & President, Samast AI / Director of Scientific Outreach, ASIP
• Lauren Kane, CEO, BioOne
• Martin Majlund, Director of Innovation, The Foundry, ACS
• Dustin Smith, President & Co-Founder, Hum

We're living in challenging times for research funding—budgets are tighter, priorities are competing, and every dollar needs to count. These constraints are certainly obstacles, but they’re also opportunities to get creative, strategic, and maybe a little bold. So how can organizations best allocate resources to secure a successful future for themselves and the broader scholarly publishing landscape? Our session offered attendees a framework for pitching new investment ideas to sharks, which we recap below.

The Framework

Attendees selected five “problem statements” to address with their pitch, then divided into groups to develop pitches based on the following framework:

• Problem: What problem or challenge in scholarly publishing is being addressed?
• Solution: How does the idea or product solve this problem? Is it novel or unique?
• Market: Who are the potential users or beneficiaries? What is the target audience?
• Impact: What will the solution accomplish? How will it benefit scholarly publishing?
• Feasibility: Can this solution realistically be developed, produced, and brought to market successfully? (Technical / Economic / Market feasibility)
• Resources: Clarify what the pitcher needs in terms of support or resources (e.g., funding, partnerships, access to networks).

The Pitches

The groups delivered 2-minute pitches of their solutions and answered questions from the Sharks about business models, data sources, audiences, and more. Here’s an overview of what they came up with:

• Scientific Collaboration and Networking Platforms
  • Problem: Researchers often work in silos, limiting interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge sharing across geographical and institutional boundaries.
  • Solution: Constellia.io addresses the problem of lost collaboration opportunities at academic conferences, where meaningful connections between researchers often fade after initial meetings despite shared interests and complementary expertise. The platform creates a "collaboration constellation" by analyzing existing data from conference abstracts, speaker information, and institutional affiliations to map hidden connections and potential partnerships within scholarly communities using ORCID and AI-powered matching. This community insight engine will help academic organizations identify collaboration opportunities, editorial prospects, and emerging research clusters without requiring researchers to join another social platform.
• Research Workflow Optimization Tools
  • Problem: Scientists face inefficiencies in data collection, analysis, and manuscript preparation, leading to delays in research output and publication.
  • Solution: This pitch proposed a digital collaboration platform that uses AI to break down communication barriers between researchers from different disciplines, like mathematicians and biologists, by translating their work and language in real-time on a shared canvas. The solution aims to accelerate research innovation by enabling cross-functional teams to easily share papers, data, and notes while an LLM automatically interprets and contextualizes information for each researcher's background. The company plans to monetize through institutional subscriptions, targeting the global research community and academic institutions to drive faster collaboration and breakthrough discoveries.
• Solutions Addressing Research Integrity and Reproducibility
  • Problem: Many published studies cannot be reproduced, undermining scientific credibility and wasting research resources.
  • Solution: Reproducibility Bot is an AI model that publishers can deploy alongside journal articles to automatically assess and verify research reproducibility, aiming to increase trust in scientific publications and incentivize higher quality research. The team plans to start with epidemiology research using PubMed data, creating a transparent verification system that could eventually provide researchers with reproducibility badges, contribute to metrics like altmetrics, and allow universities to display trust seals showing their research reliability rates. Their business model involves proving the concept with key journals and institutions in epidemiology, then scaling to other fields and potentially partnering with major academic platforms like Clarivate or Digital Science.
• Science Communication / Community Outreach
  • Problem: Complex scientific findings are frequently inaccessible to non-specialist audiences, hindering public understanding and support for research.
  • Solution: The Bridge is an AI-powered post-acceptance workflow designed to tackle the problem that 95% of publicly-funded research never reaches the general public, remaining trapped in dense academic papers while researchers struggle to demonstrate broader impact for career advancement and publishers lose relevance to social media platforms. The AI-powered platform automatically interviews researchers about their published work, transforms it into compelling stories for different audiences, connects them with science communicators, generates social content and media pitches, and compiles everything into tenure portfolios with impact metrics. The business model targets publishers who pay for the service because when their published research goes viral, it increases their journal's impact factor and prestige, making them "must-publish destinations" that attract more high-quality submissions and subscriptions.

• Ethical AI in Peer Review
  • Problem: The potential for bias and fairness issues in peer review is a growing concern in scholarly publishing.
  • Solution: This pitch aims to address bias and fairness issues in the peer review system, where each publisher currently uses their own fragmented approaches and tools to solve reviewer selection and quality problems. The proposed platform would create a unified, trusted system that helps publishers identify diverse reviewers globally (ensuring geographic representation), uses AI to guide quality reviews, allows reviewers to claim verified profiles, and enables editors to score reviewer performance over time to build trust metrics. The business model starts with publishers who face the most pressing bias issues and are willing to invest, with plans to eventually expand to funders and other stakeholders who also need trusted reviewer networks, requiring initial investment to build the community before monetization like other social platforms.

The Result

In the end, the Sharks chose the Bridge pitch as the winner for several key reasons:

• Practical feasibility: They praised it as "lightweight to get off the ground" compared to other more complex solutions, making it an attractive investment opportunity that could scale quickly.
• Addresses critical current needs: The judges emphasized that Bridge tackles urgent, timely issues in scholarly publishing - the need for better scientific communication, helping researchers defend science "especially in the present moment," and the imperative for publishers to "remain relevant" or risk losing their audience to social media platforms.
• Strategic business opportunity: From a "purely capitalistic perspective," they saw Bridge as essential for keeping publishing viable, noting that publishers have both a responsibility and financial incentive to solve the communication gap between research and the public, making it a compelling value proposition that publishers would be motivated to invest in.

This framework can serve as a great starting point for internal brainstorming, pitch development, or go-to-market creation, are poised to become increasingly important as budgets tighten and investments become more competitive. Sharks are optional.

Attendees of the Annual Meeting can revisit the session recording here.