Conquering worldwide inequality in access to scientific literature: ZendyPlus now available in Morocco
Feb 13, 2020 |
6 Mins Read
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, 13th February 2020 – Users in Morocco can now access more than 120,000 publications, including 30,000 journals and 30,000 eBooks across all disciplines through a simple monthly subscription to ZendyPlus.
Access to scientific literature, particularly in developing countries, has been an obstacle in global scholarly discovery for years. The need for reliable resources in Morocco has never been higher with the rapidly growing student population. Students enrolled in tertiary education has increased from 295,634 to 1.01 million in 17 years (source: Statista).
In the current academic environment, individuals require university facilitated access to navigate paywalled research databases. However, many regional universities exist with limited resources, not to mention the vast majority of the public not affiliated with institutions. Alternatively, students, doctors, researchers, and independent learners must generally pay a fee of up to $40 per article to access the latest scientific research.
"Each day that research is unavailable to large communities, we miss out on opportunities that are possible when research is accessible and searchable. The Zendy team is incredibly excited to have Morocco on board and hopes to one day unlock all human potential by granting global access to all scholarly literature." – Founder and CEO, Knowledge E, Kamran R. Kardan
Zendy is an online platform created to provide individuals with access to scholarly research and literature by making it affordable and accessible to everyone. The platform is suited for all academic and non-academic professionals, students, and knowledge enthusiasts.
Take a step towards a more knowledgeable self and sign up on Zendy today!
About Zendy
Zendy is an online platform created to provide individuals with access to scholarly research and literature. Zendy originates from the notion of building a more knowledgeable world, as there has never been a time where easy, affordable access to content has been more needed. Current scholarly databases exist behind crippling paywalls or require university facilitated access, which is a challenge for individuals across the globe not affiliated with institutions. Access to scientific publications is particularly troublesome in developing countries, where many universities cannot afford the subscription databases required for advancing research and studies. Zendy is working to remove barriers from scholarly discovery to make academic literature affordable and accessible to everyone, all academic and non-academic professionals, students, and knowledge enthusiasts.
Zendy is developed by Knowledge E in a growing collaboration with researchers, students, institutions, and publishers to facilitate the democratisation of knowledge.
Zendy is now available in Jordan and Morocco with the rest of Africa and Middle East to follow in 2020.
About Knowledge E
Established in 2012, Knowledge E’s name was fast to become synonymous with collaboration, professionalism and innovation. Head-quartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and supported by a team of 30 highly engaged professionals, Knowledge E works closely with over 100 clients world-wide from various types of organisations and government entities within the research and education sector to support their continued innovation and development. This is achieved by providing leading expertise, information resources and software solutions. Since its inception, Knowledge E has prudently expanded its expertise, services and technology in line with its vision of developing ‘a more knowledgeable world’. Knowledge E’s three core offerings are the 3D’s; ‘Discover’, ‘Develop’ and ‘Disseminate’. ‘Discover’ through the KnE Digital Library Solutions powered by Zendy for research literature discovery, as well as tailored content packages; ‘Develop’ through the KnE Learning Programmes, supporting capacity building and skills development within academia as well as the KnE Consulting Projects, serving universities on their mission to become ‘world-class universities’; and ‘Disseminate’ through the KnE Publishing Services and the platform for Open Access publishing of regional journals and conference proceedings.
Zendy Announces New Version Releases of ZAIA - AI Assistant
United Arab Emirates, 13th March 2024 - AI-powered research library Zendy has announced the launch of a significant version release for its domain-specific Large Language Model (LMM), ZAIA (Zendy AI Assistant). Developed by Zendy’s data science team and initially launched in December 2023, ZAIA is designed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of research discovery and literature review. In this new version, a host of new features have been introduced to support researchers: Ask ZAIA: You can now ask specific questions to ZAIA on a paper level, giving you a new way to conduct in-depth analysis during literature review. PDF Analysis: ZAIA can now analyse any PDF. Upload or link a research paper with sections, and ZAIA will extract, analyse, and summarise each section, including the abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and references. Reference validation and verification: using techniques such as chain of verification, all references go through a validation and verification process to increase accuracy. Conversation and analysis history: once you log in, you can now see a complete history of all conversations with ZAIA and a history of PDFs analysed. An enhanced fine-tuned model for increased accuracy. ZAIA is also now accessible without registration. ZAIA is not a general-purpose language model. It is fine-tuned with Zendy’s own data sources, allowing it to support higher-level abstractions for research-specific use cases. “ZAIA 0.1 takes us closer to our vision of creating an ecosystem of research-centric AI tools using the latest development methods that increase efficiency and reliability. The future of research is intertwined with the vast capabilities of AI, and we are committed to leveraging the best of AI to provide solutions to the pressing issues researchers face in research discovery,” said Zendy’s Chief Technology Officer, Rodrigo Pinto. “We have a core focus on increasing collaboration with publishers and data providers to navigate the increasing potential of AI. We look forward to extending the vast capabilities of our LLM and all our learnings to institutions, publishers, and organisations looking to streamline information discovery and retrieval using AI,” said Zendy Co-founder Kamran Kardan. Committed to helping foster an ecosystem of collaborative partnerships rooted in responsible AI practices, Zendy believes AI is important in fostering an equitable research and publishing ecosystem, but only with ethical guidelines. In response to the growing discussion around AI, Zendy recently released a list of AI imperatives to guide strategic development and the integration of AI technologies. To find out more about Zendy’s AI solutions, email hello@zendy.io. You can use ZAIA now on Zendy, visit www.zendy.io/zaia. To read the Zendy AI Imperatives statement, click here. About Zendy Zendy is a product of Knowledge E. Since its inception in 2019, Zendy has introduced over 500,000 users to a better way to research. Zendy’s intuitive AI-powered research library features millions of journals, articles, e-books, and more, allowing users to access unlimited content for an affordable monthly subscription. Zendy also offers a free open-access plan. Press contact: Monica Chinsami Head of Marketing
Zendy and IntechOpen's Joint Webinar: Addressing Accessibility, Discoverability and a Sustainable Future.
We hosted a joint webinar with IntechOpen in November that addressed emerging technologies across different industries that contribute to sustainability and research accessibility and discovery. The webinar was titled, “Emerging Technologies - Partnering for Accessibility, Discoverability and a Sustainable Future.” The session featured 3 key speakers, Dr. Jo Havemann representing AfricArXiv, Professor Tatiana Morosuk from Technical University of Berlin and Zendy’s Head of Marketing, Monica Chinsami. Each speaker articulated how their organisation works to increase sustainable practices through research dissemination. Zendy’s Head of Marketing, Monica Chinsami highlighted our library’s initiatives to advance the accessibility and discoverability of scholarly literature. In an effort to break geographical barriers in research, Zendy partners with leading publishers to ensure their content reaches regions with limited access via our global subscription. Additionally, Professor Tatiana Morosuk from the Technical University of Berlin placed emphasis on the transionary period the energy sector is experiencing as it moves away from fossil fuel and towards technology focused on sustainability. The professor stated the importance of innovation to advance sustainable practices and energy use. Finally, Dr. Jo Havemann stated how AfricArXiv is on a mission to make African research more discoverable as this is in line with SDG 4 (Quality Education), the organisation announced their collaboration with Ubuntunet which is a network provider that assists with connectivity and infrastructure for research and education institutions. Advancing research dissemination catalyses SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). As equitable research platforms emerge and partner to expand their reach, the more academic research is democratised to create knowledgable societies. We look forward to hosting more webinars in 2024, to tackle and highlight the initiatives in the world of academia. Discover millions of e-books, journal articles, proceedings and more on Zendy now.
Zendy Launches ZAIA, a Domain-Specific AI Assistant
United Arab Emirates, 15 December 2023 - AI-powered research library, Zendy, announced the launch of its AI Assistant, ZAIA, a domain-specific Large Language Model (LMM) developed by Zendy’s data science team. ZAIA (short for Zendy AI Assistant) exists to help researchers quickly understand key research concepts and discover research papers that specifically link to inputs. These two functions enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the literature review process. You can ask any research-related question, and ZAIA will analyse millions of academic research papers to give you credible answers backed by references. Unlike general-purpose language models, ZAIA is trained with Zendy’s own data. In the future, it can also query, in real-time, additional sources from publisher data that are not available on the public domain. There is growing recognition of the necessity for domain-specific solutions to strengthen the credibility of data. Fine tuning models on domain-specific data narrows down the LLM’s focus to improve performance in a defined context, thus reducing the likelihood of hallucinations. “We developed ZAIA to advance the usage of AI on research platforms and improve the research discovery process for researchers. ZAIA aims to assist readers on Zendy by quickly solving research-related questions. ZAIA stands out from other AI products as it is fed real-time data and information available on Zendy, which is then fine-tuned to efficiently cater to our users,” said Zendy’s Head of Technology, Rodrigo Pinto. “The first iteration of our LLM, ZAIA, is our unique AI offering for Zendy users who can now leverage the best of AI to improve their research discovery process. This is a very exciting milestone for Zendy and we look forward to the feedback from our valued users,” said Zendy Co-founder Kamran Kardan. Committed to helping foster an ecosystem of collaborative partnerships rooted in responsible AI practices, Zendy’s Large Language Model is built to be entirely customisable. It has the capacity to learn from diverse datasets with integration made simple through Restful API’s or Websocket APIs. “Bigger picture, our technology presents limitless potential for organisations and institutions yet to integrate the power of LLMs into their workflows. The potential is immeasurable, with use cases including on-demand tutoring, psychology support services, employee onboarding, the list goes on,” continued Kamran Kardan. To find out more about Zendy’s AI solutions email hello@zendy.io. You can use ZAIA now on Zendy. To access, log in or sign up to Zendy: www.zendy.io.