10 May 2022
Faculty Opinions, an H1 community and global research curation and recommendation service, has announced it is making its article recommendations free-to-access to current and new users via its platform.
The pivot to a freemium model for the service, enabled as a result of its acquisition by H1, has been a part of Faculty Opinions’ long-term ambition to bring the insights and opinions of its esteemed Faculty of over 8,000 experts to a much larger and wider global audience that goes beyond its traditional audience within academic scientific and medical research institutions.
“It has always been the mission of Faculty Opinions to serve the scientific and medical research communities by highlighting the best research as recommended by Faculty Members – all experts in their specialist fields,” said H1 CEO, Ariel Katz. “H1’s acquisition of Faculty Opinions earlier this year has given them the opportunity to accelerate its efforts to illuminate and showcase the very best new research and solve the problems of its users by helping them keep on top of, and make sense of, the ever-growing mountain of literature.”
In explaining the decision, Faculty Opinions’ Managing Director, Tiago Barros said, “We’ve listened closely to feedback from our Faculty Members, institutional customers and end-users and have created a strategy that best serves the community’s needs while allowing us to continue to develop innovative tools and solutions that maximize the value of the content within Faculty Opinions. This is an exciting time for the platform with new premium features for our enterprise and institutional customers due to be launched throughout 2022/23. We are delighted to be at this point of change for Faculty Opinions so quickly.”
Coupled with the reach of H1 within the life sciences and healthcare industries, Faculty Opinions is uniquely positioned to expose the diversity and richness of research beyond that which is typically found in the leading journals. In doing so, it will contribute to H1’s mission of creating a healthier future for all by evaluating acclaimed research, surfacing lesser-known but excellent studies that often go undiscovered by many and identifying emerging trends to provide the insight needed to take research to the next level.
Faculty Opinions will also continue as a premium subscription service for enterprise and institutional customers, providing additional tools to interrogate and interpret the data and insights within the platform, as well as accessing additional content streams, including the Faculty Reviews journal and Landmark Evaluations, bespoke reporting and trend analysis.
The response to the move to open up recommendations to new audiences has been welcomed by Faculty Members:
“Having the opinions of recognized experts more widely available has the very realistic potential to greatly improve patient care,” said Professor Maurie Markman, Faculty Opinions Section Head and President of Medicine & Science, Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
“Life Sciences and Medicine need new ideas and findings to be promoted beyond their original publication, since both fields are often held back by dogma and habit,” Professor Neil Blumberg, University of Rochester Medical Center, USA, said. “If Faculty Opinions call attention to new ideas and findings for the public and communities they represent, these ideas will be investigated and, if appropriate, supported far faster.”