Celebrating 10 Years of BIP! Services: A Decade of Supporting Research

This year marks an important milestone for us: BIP! Services turn 10! For a full decade, our suite has been in continuous production, supporting the research community at large in discovering and making sense of scientific knowledge.

BIP! Services was designed with a clear mission: to empower the research community through tools that explore novel ideas to simplify researchers’ daily routines. Today, the suite includes four complementary services: 

• Finder, an open academic search engine enhancing knowledge discovery across scientific publications;
• Scholar, an open profiling platform where researchers can build and share career summaries using diverse templates, while research assessment experts can experiment with and evaluate new profile templates in collaboration with volunteers;
• Readings, a library of user-curated publication lists that supports literature organization and note-taking; and
• Spaces, a service for creating tailored search engines designed to meet the needs of specific organisations or communities, connecting them with curated knowledge bases.

Together, these services address a wide range of researcher needs, supporting activities that are common across diverse scientific domains.

Our journey began in 2016 with BIP! Finder, initially focused on the Life Sciences domain and leveraging scholarly data from MEDLINE. The service originated from the vision of our research team at the Information Management Systems Institute (IMSI) of ATHENA RC to experiment with impact-based publication ranking algorithms in real-world scenarios. At the time, the team was actively exploring how different ranking approaches capture distinct aspects of scientific impact, work that later led to a large-scale experimental study. Early findings suggested that no single ranking method could provide a complete picture; instead, different algorithms highlighted complementary dimensions, each potentially more relevant depending on the context. 

Building on these insights, the team set out to develop an experimental service that would allow researchers to rank publications using multiple algorithms, essentially offering richer and more nuanced views than traditional search engines of the time. This vision was first explored in 2015 through MirPub v2, a specialized search engine for miRNA research. Drawing on that experience, the team moved toward developing a more general-purpose search engine for the Life Sciences, leading to the creation of BIP! Finder in 2016. 

By 2018, BIP! expanded beyond its original scope, embracing multidisciplinary data (initially using open scholarly data from Crossref and a couple of other sources), and redefining its identity to better reflect a broader research landscape. In 2019, a bookmarking feature was introduced in BIP! Finder, which later evolved into a standalone service called BIP! Readings. 

In the first quarter of 2022, BIP! Scholar was launched with the aim to demonstrate that comprehensive researcher profiles could be built using open scholarly data. The platform was subsequently extended within the context of the GraspOS project to align more closely with responsible research assessment practices, supporting experts in experimenting with innovative approaches to researcher profiling.

Finally, in the first quarter of 2024, BIP! Spaces was introduced as part of the SciLake project. This service enables communities and organizations to create customized search environments by combining and curating their own knowledge bases, addressing specialized needs and use cases.

Over the years, the suite has grown not only in scope but also in impact, supporting a wide range of research activities and contributing to the global scientific ecosystem. Today, BIP! Services serves a growing community of more than 740 registered users, reflecting its steady adoption and relevance across disciplines.

Reaching this 10-year milestone is not just about looking back; it’s also about moving forward. Exciting new features are currently in development, so stay tuned for updates. 

In addition, we’re introducing a special anniversary campaign to celebrate this occasion: in the coming months, we will publish a series of blog posts exploring each service in depth, its motivation, design, and use cases. We will also share user stories and testimonials, highlighting how BIP! Services support real research journeys

BIP! Services would not have been possible without our users and community. Your feedback, engagement, and trust have shaped BIP! Services into what it is today.

As we celebrate 10 years of continuous service, we remain committed to innovation and to supporting the evolving needs of researchers everywhere.

Stay tuned, there’s much more to come.

Blog post DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19599353 

^{-- Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash}