UPublish is on a mission to increase access to knowledge by reducing  publishing costs.

On March 13, 2020, the chief science advisors of 16 countries—including the U.S., Germany, India and China—sent an open letter to the scholarly publishing community stating “To assist efforts to contain and mitigate the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic, basic science research and innovation will be vital to addressing this global crisis. Given the urgency of the situation, it is particularly important that scientists and the public can access research outcomes as soon as possible.” This shows how open-access, or free access to the latest research published in academic journals, can help advance research and development. Without open-access to all the COVID-19 research, we would not have multiple viable vaccine candidates developed in record time.

Artificial restrictions to accessing academic journals due to the high financial burden of journal subscription costs results in inequitable access to research globally. For example, a researcher at IIT Kanpur, one of the top academic institutions in India, may have access to only 12% of the knowledge and advances in research compared to someone at Harvard University.

Research advances in any field need to be published in academic journals to be professionally accepted. However, 60% of the world’s academic journals are controlled by five big publishers who control access to the published research. They have been increasing journal subscription costs for decades and libraries can no longer afford their subscriptions. This slows down academic advancement, subsequently increasing social and economic injustice against countries with less resources.

UPublish is a cloud-native software platform that enables academic societies to publish and run their own journals independently. UPublish strives to democratize knowledge by reducing journal publishing costs—thus promoting equitable access to academic research and significantly lowering expenses for libraries,  universities, and research institutes.

We are participating in the Little Bang! and Big Bang! competitions and use their deadlines as a way to define our team’s timeline for various milestones. During the winter quarter, we plan to conduct informational interviews with different stakeholders in the scholarly publishing industry, including librarians, journal editors, academic societies and researchers. We would also ask some of the experts we interview to be our mentors and guide us in this process.

Our team is actively building necessary skills by attending workshops and taking relevant classes. Supratim is a Leaders for the Future fellow and has attended the UC Entrepreneurship Academy, and is taking additional courses on entrepreneurship along with workshops by the Student Startup Center. Anirban has the technological background and connections in the software industry to help us develop our software platform. Cole and Jolie are MBA candidates at the Graduate School of Management who bring business skills and experience to the team. Additionally, Cole is finishing up his J.D. degree from UC Hastings College of the Law and brings valuable legal know-how to our team.

The process of making our poster for Little Bang! allowed us to think about how to succinctly present our idea to the general public. The feedback from the judges provided us with pertinent questions that we look to answer going forward.

Moreover, seeing the other teams present their innovative ideas gave us inspiration to continue developing ours.

With no business experience, we were skeptical of making the leap to entrepreneurship. Little Bang! was the first business plan competition our team participated in and was a huge motivating factor for us to keep continuing. We are looking forward to participating in the Little Bang! Round 2 and the Big Bang! competition.

Meet the UPublish Team

Supratim Dey: Ph.D. Candidate in Planetary Science | 2021/22 Business Development Fellow

Anirban Samanta: Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical & Computer Engineering

Cole Smith-Crowley: MBA Candidate; J.D. at UC Hastings College of the Law (December 2020)

Jolie Wu, MBA Candidate