If you’ve ever had trouble finding quality academic research papers online to help you make smart decisions as a student, lecturer, businessman, or investor, thanks to Iso Bassey, that problem now seizes to exist. On the 1^st of September, 2015, academix.ng was launched. Academix is a digital library containing issues of academic journals and thesis, established to bridge the knowledge gap in Nigeria, and to meet a growing demand for high quality Nigerian-focused research.

Ventures Africa spoke with Iso Bassey, the founder and CEO of Academix. He explained how his frustration turned him into a problem solver, and the businessman that he is today.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, and Academix?

Well, I am a civil engineer, with a Masters in Information Systems from the University of Leeds. I worked as a software developer for about nine years in the United Kingdom, and then came back to Nigeria, where I started a private business in 2007. And in 2009, I took up an appointment with the government of Cross River state as a special assistant to the governor on ICT.  I resigned from that position in June last year and began to work on this project (Academix).

So you’ve been on the Academix project for more than a year now?

Well, when I resigned in June, I actually took up a position with the Port Harcourt world book capital project. I don’t know if you are aware of it, but Port Harcourt was UNESCO’s World Book Capital 2014. So I briefly headed operations with that project and in January, we started the preparation for Academix in earnest.

So why did you decide to establish Academix? What’s the idea behind it?

First of all, I have always been someone who believes in the power of internet for networking and access to information. I did not mention this earlier but in 2002/2003, I actually founded a website called ‘Nigeria Friends’. It was Nigeria’s first social networking site, to network people around schools. So I’ve always had the passion for web project.

Now, how Academix came about was a couple of years ago, in 2013. I was actually looking to facilitate a real estate project in Calabar – which is where I am based – and quite a few things were happening; General Electric had just indicated interest in coming into Calabar to start a one billion dollar plan, so we felt that there will be the need for real estate to support the professionals who were going to come in. Anyway, long story short, we looked for information to support decision to make that investment. We were looking for such information that would tell us how property prices had varied over the last 10/20 years, so that we could build a case for that project, and it was very difficult to come across anything. The one person who had that information to support the decision would not give us unless we paid N50000, she wouldn’t even let us read the abstract of the work. So from that point, it just occurred to me that a site where anybody looking for high quality research material about Nigeria would be of great benefit. And that’s how Academix came about.

So this is a typical case of solving a problem; I mean solving your need and also solving the need of others.

Absolutely. Maybe it came a bit late for my need, but hopefully, it is serving the need of other people.

How do you source for papers and materials that you put up on Academix?

We do that through partnerships. So we have identified that you can get research from academia, talking about tertiary institutions. You can also get it from government research agencies, and from professional bodies. Most of these research go into journals. So what we have devised is a model that enables us partner with journals. We actually offer our services free of charge to journals, some journals are open access, and some of them you have to pay to access the content. Our service is free of charge to both, and then we share revenue with the ones that require fee. So we are actually helping them generate revenue. Currently, we are seeking partnership all around tertiary institutions, government research agencies, journals and a whole lot.

But so far, you have partnered with about 36 institutions right?

I wish I could say yes, but that’s not the case. On our website, you will see 36 institutions, what it means is that the authors of the papers in our database are affiliated with 36 institutions.

At the moment, we have partnered with 15 journals, actually we have journals that are in the process of loading … and on the site today, we have just over 2400 papers listed.

So are you not in partnership with any institution yet?

We are. We are in partnership with institutions. For example, we are in partnership with the chemical society of Nigeria, we are also in partnership with the Nigerian Environmental Society, and then we’ve got partnership with several journals. What we are doing in addition to that is pursuing partnership with the tertiary institutions.

We are proposing to universities to have their post graduate research work, research abstracts listed on Academix. That is something we are actively pursuing and I just came back from meetings with the University of Port Harcourt, and Rivers State University of Technology. I also have a meeting on Thursday with Covenant University, and we are also seeking partnership with the NUC – National Universities Commission.

If you are partnering with these universities and these institutions, there are thousands of projects written yearly. Is there a selection process for the research papers you put on your site? What do you look out for?

First of all, we are very mindful of the quality of material that goes up on Academix, so with the universities, we only put up postgraduate recitations. We do not look at anything undergraduate; it is either Masters or Ph.D. Another thing that we do is to leave the selection process to the universities. As a university, whatever you put up on Academix is your representative, so it is in the universities’ best interest to select their best projects.

How do you plan to expand in the next couple of months?

As far as expansion over the next few months is concerned, our strategy is to grow Academix very aggressively. We set a monthly goal target of 3,000 papers. We are not going to meet that target this month but we’ll probably be around half the target. That is our very aggressive growth strategy. But you know, in the long term, maybe by the time we are very comfortable in the Nigerian market, we will be looking to expand this, offering similar services to other institutions outside Nigeria.

We know there are a lot of e-libraries in Nigeria, and once these e-libraries are established, they spend a lot of money subscribing to content from North America and Europe. So we’ve got these large content providers. We are doing pretty much the same thing, but we are looking to position ourselves to provide a local content for e- libraries and corporate subscriptions in Nigeria.

So it’s not strictly Nigerian?

All of our papers are published in Nigeria. All of our work is Nigeria-focused; our publishers are all based in Nigeria. The research is all about things within Nigeria.

What about other African countries?

Well, I think our long term strategy would be to take on the whole continent, but for now, we are just focused here. One of our competition is African Journals Online and it’s based in South Africa. I think they have about 500 plus journals, and about half of those journals are Nigerian based journals.

Really?

Yes, the Nigerian market is quite large and we carry out far more research than any other country on the continent.

But how much progress have you recorded so far? I know it might too early to ask, but how much traffic do you get on your site?

Well, traffic rush, we seem to have about 1500 – 2500 visits to the site daily, and this is driven by … because our site is optimized for search engines so a lot of those traffic comes through places like Google when people search for keywords.

In terms of the materials on your website, you have eight disciplines, but what I noticed is that life science has more content, and most of these contents are agriculture based journals. Is there a reason for this?

You are right. Many of them are science based papers now. Maybe you could say it’s just where we started. But Academix very much cuts across multiple disciplines, so we are pursuing journals in law, research in social sciences, research in history, music, … whatever it is, once it is good quality research coming from Nigeria, we are after it. We are a little over a month old, so am sure that in the next couple of weeks we would have a more diverse range of papers.

People can only preview the abstract of papers on Academix; how do you fix the problem of people who are not satisfied or convinced with just that, given the fact that people need some level of convincing to purchase a material?

Like you said, truly, at the moment, everything on Academix actually has a price attached to it, but we support open access materials and free access. For the open access, you can read the abstract and download them for free. In about 24 hours, you will begin to see some open access materials on the site.

So back to your question, I think that this is a model that is fairly universal. The abstract gives you a summary of what the entire work is about, and usually the abstract has more than enough information to enable one make the decision as to whether he or she would like to purchase the material or not. We might not be able to give a little bit more than the abstract, otherwise we’ll be giving away too much

In terms of competition, I know you mentioned African Journals Online earlier, so what is it that Academix is bringing to the table that is different from similar sites?

Well, African Journals Online deals only with journals and the as the name implies, the journals there are from different countries. How we differ from them is that our research does not come only from journals, so like I said to you, we are partnering with tertiary institutions. So we will have the abstracts of university post graduate dissertation on Academix, so that if you are interested in research that has been done in any if the Nigerian university, you will search Academix and see what has been done. We think that this will lead to a lot of collaborations among our tertiary institutions.

And again, where we are heading to is to be able to provide subscriptions to institutions. Take the University of Lagos for instance having a subscription to the Academix database for an annual fee and then they are able to maybe go in there, probably about 100 people at a time accessing content on Academix at no extra cost. So that is the sort of service we are looking to offer which none of our competitions are doing.

Do you have any last words?

Well, all I will say is that Academix is looking to bridge the knowledge gap and I think Academix is coming at the right time for Nigeria because as we know, the country is the largest economy in Africa, and what that means is that the spotlight, you know with businesses and the larger countries looking to expand business frontiers, they are looking for high growth market like Nigeria, and we know that investors do not just jump in and make decisions. They make decisions based on knowledge, and based on information. So I think Academix is coming at just the right time for Nigeria, to aid product and policy development decisions, and so I think that we have a big role to play in encouraging foreign direct investments in Nigeria.