Research Hubs

Every researcher,
made visible.

OpenScholar Research Hubs. Your research, generated from where it already lives. Now clearly defined and easy to discover in one place.

Bring your research into focus →

A tablet screen displays an OpenScholar Research Hub.

ONE COMPLETE HUB

Everything that defines your research, built automatically.

Research Hubs automatically pull together information from where research already lives, across trusted platforms and repositories, creating a complete research profile with minimal faculty effort.

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WHAT HUBS DELIVER

Infrastructure that works the way research does.

⊞

Complete and clearly structured.

Captures every dimension of a researcher's public footprint and automatically organizes the full scope into a single record.

Screenshots of Hubs sections, arranged in a layered format with the headings Funding Alignment, Methods, and Research Areas.

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⌕

Equally visible and easily discovered.

Establishes faculty visibility as an institutional standard, ensuring every researcher is discoverable to funders, collaborators, prospective students, and more.

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WHY HUBS

What makes Hubs different.

⧉

Every research output

Hubs are a full, structured representation of a researcher's work compiled from recognized sources—not a partial profile or a single subset of their research.

↻

Automatic from the start

Every Hub is automatically generated from where research already lives. Each researcher validates their Hub in about 15 minutes. Nothing to fill out. Nothing to maintain.

◎

Match included

Every Hub includes Match. Match reads the structured content of the Hub and surfaces aligned funding opportunities, then delivers them each month directly to the researcher.

⬡

Compounds at scale

When your institution deploys Hubs, your researchers join a network. Every added Hub makes discovery, collaboration, and cross-institutional research more possible.

HOW IT WORKS

Complete and published in three seamless steps.

Research is gathered.

The Hubs generator automatically gathers and organizes research from trusted sources.

Researcher validates.

The researcher reviews and validates in about 15 minutes.

Go live.

Hubs launch—complete, discoverable, and connected across the network.

HOW IT COMPARES

See how Research Hubs compare to traditional websites and platforms.

	Research Hub	Traditional website	Faculty information system	Faculty directory	Google Scholar
Core purpose	What this researcher does, and why to connect	Whatever the researcher chooses to share	Administrative record for reporting and compliance	Who's here — name, title, contact	List of publications and citations
Effort to maintain	None required, generated automatically	High, faculty must build and update it themselves	High, manual entry to satisfy reporting needs	Low, but limited to static info	None, but scope is fixed to publications
Update model	Refreshed once or twice a year by design, so it never goes stale or gets abandoned	Whenever (if ever) the researcher finds time	Cyclical, tied to reporting deadlines	Rarely, only on role or contact changes	Continuous, but publications only
Relationship to authoritative sources	Interprets and links to PubMed, Scholar, ORCID, and others	May link out, inconsistently	Feeds internal systems, not public sources	No connection	Is itself a source — no interpretation layer
Collaboration and funding alignment	Actively surfaces overlap and funding fit; extendable via OS Match	None	None	None	None
Audience served	Collaborators, funders, journalists, and institutional leaders, all at once	General public, if maintained	Internal administrators only	Internal lookup	Anyone searching citations
Built for how research is found today	Structured for AI and answer engines (AEO), not just human readers	Human browsing only	Not public-facing	Human browsing only	Indexed, but not narrative
Foundation for future services	Powers funding match, collaborator match, SEO/AEO, and services not yet built	None — a one-off asset	None — closed system	None — static record	None — fixed feature set
Scalability across the institution	Can cover every researcher, regardless of who's motivated to self-maintain	Only the subset who build and tend their own site	Universal, but internal-only	Universal, but minimal	Automatic, but publications only
Institutional impact and discoverability	Consistent, brandable way to demonstrate aggregate research strength	Inconsistent — a patchwork by researcher	Invisible externally	Minimal external value	External, but not institutionally branded

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Are Research Hubs just one more thing we have to maintain?

No. In fact, Research Hubs are designed to solve that problem. Hubs can be generated without requiring faculty to build or maintain them, and they focus on research information designed to stay relevant over time—such as Research Summary, Expertise & Skills, Collaboration Alignment, and Funding Alignment. Rather than duplicating information that changes frequently, Hubs connect visitors directly to authoritative sources like PubMed, Google Scholar, and other research repositories. Researchers can refine their Hub if they choose, but they don't have to continually update another website or profile to maintain a meaningful, discoverable research presence.

Rather than asking every researcher to become a content manager, Hubs are designed to provide a strong research presence with little or no ongoing faculty burden.

Do we still need faculty profiles if we have Research Hubs?

Not necessarily in their current form. A department or institution may choose to keep its faculty directory very simple—name, title, department, contact information, and perhaps a few other institutional details—then link directly to each researcher's Hub for a fuller view of their research.

The directory serves one purpose: Who is here?
The Hub serves another: What does this researcher do, and why might I want to connect with them?

This approach can reduce duplication while giving researchers a much richer research presence.

Are Research Hubs intended to replace faculty profiles?

They can complement an existing faculty profile system or, depending on an institution's needs, eliminate the need to maintain a separate detailed public research profile.

Faculty information systems often serve important administrative purposes such as annual reporting, activity tracking, accreditation, and institutional records. Hubs aren't intended to replace those functions.

Instead, Hubs can become the public-facing research destination, while the institution retains whatever underlying systems it needs for administration and reporting.

How are Research Hubs different from faculty profiles?

Faculty profiles typically answer:
Who is this faculty member?

Research Hubs go further:
What does this researcher do, where does their expertise lie, and why should I connect with them?

A Hub brings together a Research Summary, Expertise & Skills, Collaboration Alignment, Funding Alignment, and links to authoritative research sources to make the researcher's work easier to understand and act upon.

The goal isn't simply visibility. It's visibility that leads to opportunity.

Do researchers need individual websites if they have Hubs?

For many researchers, probably not.

Researchers who need extensive content, lab information, project pages, recruiting information, news, multimedia, or customized storytelling may still benefit from a full website.

But many individual researchers primarily need a professional digital presence where people can understand their work, explore their expertise, and find their scholarship.

For those researchers, a Hub may be all they need.

Every researcher needs to be findable. Not every researcher needs to maintain a website.

What if a researcher already has a website?

Great. The Hub can link directly to it.

A Hub doesn't have to compete with a researcher's existing digital presence. It can act as the front door to their research, connecting visitors to their website as well as PubMed, Google Scholar, ORCID, and other authoritative destinations.

Researchers who want a rich publishing environment can maintain a website. The Hub makes their research easier to discover and connect with opportunity.

How do Hubs stay relevant if researchers aren't constantly updating them?

Hubs are intentionally designed around information that remains useful over time.

Rather than attempting to reproduce every changing publication, award, news story, or grant, Hubs focus on the enduring elements of a researcher's work—Research Summary, Expertise & Skills, Collaboration Alignment, and Funding Alignment—and connect visitors directly to authoritative sources such as PubMed and Google Scholar for evolving scholarly activity.

That reduces duplication and the problem of abandoned or outdated research pages.

Why not simply link people to Google Scholar or PubMed?

Because a publication list tells you what someone has published, not necessarily what their body of work means.

A Hub helps a visitor quickly understand:

What does this researcher study?
What expertise and skills do they bring?
Where might our work overlap?
What types of funding align with their research?
Why might I want to contact them?

Then, when someone wants to go deeper, the Hub connects them to the authoritative source.

That's the "one-stop shop" concept without trying to recreate everything that already exists elsewhere.

How do Hubs help researchers attract opportunity?

Hubs are designed not just to display research, but to make it understandable and discoverable by people looking for expertise.

That may include potential collaborators, foundations and other funders, journalists looking for subject-matter experts, industry partners, institutional leaders, prospective students, and employers.

Combined with OS Match, Hubs can also proactively connect researchers with governmental and nongovernmental funding opportunities aligned with their work.

How are Hubs different from simply using AI with a researcher's CV?

A general-purpose AI tool can analyze a CV for an individual researcher at a moment in time. Hubs create a consistent, institutionally supported research presence that can be deployed across departments or an entire institution.

The value isn't simply generating a summary. It's creating an interconnected research environment in which expertise can be discovered and ultimately connected to funding, collaborators, and other opportunities.

Can we create Hubs for every researcher?

That's exactly what they're designed for.

Because Hubs don't require every researcher to build a website or manually populate a profile, institutions can provide a meaningful research presence much more broadly.

That changes the question from:
Which faculty will actually build something?
to:
How do we make all of our research expertise discoverable?

Can researchers edit their Hubs?

Yes. Hubs can be generated without faculty involvement, but researchers can have the opportunity to refine how their work is represented.

The principle is:
Editable, but not dependent on editing.

Researchers can shape their research presence without becoming responsible for maintaining another digital property.

Can Hubs work alongside the systems we already have?

Yes. Hubs are designed to connect an institution's research ecosystem rather than require everything else to be replaced.

An institution might have a faculty information system for reporting, a directory for basic faculty information, institutional repositories, PubMed, Google Scholar, ORCID, and individual research websites where appropriate.

The Hub becomes the research-focused destination that brings those pieces together and connects the researcher to opportunity.

Who is a Research Hub for?

A Hub serves several audiences at once.

A researcher gains visibility and opportunity. A potential collaborator can quickly assess expertise and alignment. A funder or foundation can discover relevant work. A journalist can identify the right expert. An institution can illuminate expertise that might otherwise remain difficult to find.

That's why Hubs aren't simply another type of faculty page. They're designed as infrastructure for research discovery and connection.