Reimagining Researcher Profiles with BIP! Scholar

Most researcher profiling platforms, like Google Scholar, ResearchGate etc, look remarkably similar: They include a list of publications, a few citation-based metrics, perhaps a short biography. While these elements can be useful (if used responsibly), they rarely capture the full picture of a researcher’s work. Research today is far more diverse and collaborative than what can be captured by traditional researcher CVs and profiles. Indicatively, researchers contribute in developing software, creating or curating datasets, conducting peer reviews, engaging with communities, mentoring, applying open science practices, collaborating across disciplines, informing policy, and supporting numerous other forms of scholarly work. Yet these contributions often remain invisible on traditional researcher profiling platforms and, as a result, are overlooked by evaluators or anyone wanting to get a glimpse of a researcher's career. 

At the same time, the global discussion around research assessment is changing rapidly. Initiatives such as CoARA and DORA are encouraging institutions to move beyond narrow publication-based metrics and toward more responsible, contextual, and inclusive approaches to evaluation. This is exactly the challenge that the BIP! Scholar platform set out to address.

Originally launched several years ago as a platform for creating richer academic profiles, BIP! Scholar has now undergone a major transformation in the context of the GraspOS project. The result is a new generation of researcher profiling infrastructure: flexible, template-driven, and designed to support the future of responsible research assessment.

From One Fixed Researcher Profile to a Flexible Profile Ecosystem

The original version of BIP! Scholar already aimed to help researchers present their work in a more comprehensive and contextualized way. Researchers could import information from ORCID, enrich their profiles with additional metadata, and highlight different dimensions of their scholarly activities. 

However, one important limitation remained: the platform relied on a largely predefined profile structure. In practice, this meant that every researcher had to fit into the same general presentation model, even though research careers differ across disciplines, institutions, career stages, and evaluation contexts.

Through the GraspOS project, BIP! Scholar evolved from a single-template platform into a fully template-driven environment changing how researcher profiles can be created and explored within the platform. BIP! Scholar now supports multiple profile formats tailored to different assessment contexts and presentation needs.

Supporting Different Ways of Telling a Research Story

After the recently introduced changes, researchers can now create profiles using multiple types of researcher profile templates. More specifically, BIP! Scholar already offers:

• Track-based templates, which organize the research career into lists of contributions enriched with valuable context and information.
• Narrative-style templates, which allow researchers to explain the context, motivation, impact, and connections behind their work.
• Hybrid templates, which combine structured evidence with narrative elements.

This flexibility reflects an important reality: meaningful research assessment cannot rely on a one-size-fits-all representation. By enabling multiple approaches within the same platform, BIP! Scholar helps institutions and communities experiment with more responsible and context-aware assessment practices.

Beyond Publications and Metrics

The transformation of BIP! Scholar goes beyond a visual redesign. The platform provides a richer and more comprehensive representation of research careers by supporting information that extends beyond traditional publication lists. Researchers can showcase a wide range of scholarly activities and outputs, including datasets, software, and other research products.

Moreover, the platform automatically enriches publications with research topics, indicators, access information, and additional metadata harvested from open scholarly data infrastructures (primarily the OpenAIRE Graph) enabling researchers to create comprehensive research profiles.

In addition to automatically aggregated information, researchers can further enrich their profiles by adding contribution roles and narrative descriptions that highlight the connections between their works, activities, and broader research impact (each of these features is supported in different profile templates).

This helps shift attention away from simplistic rankings and toward more meaningful interpretations of scholarly contributions.

A Platform Not Only for Researchers, but Also for Assessment Experts

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the new BIP! Scholar is that it is no longer just a profile management platform. It has also become an experimentation environment for the research assessment community.

Research assessment experts, institutions, and policy stakeholders can now design and test alternative profile templates directly within the platform.

This creates a unique feedback loop:

1. Experts can prototype assessment-oriented profile structures.
2. Volunteer researchers can use these templates in real scenarios.
3. Communities can gather feedback on usability, clarity, and fairness.
4. Templates can evolve iteratively based on evidence and user experience.

This is particularly important at a time when many organizations are exploring reforms in academic evaluation but still lack practical tools for testing and validating new approaches.

Instead of discussing responsible assessment only at the policy level, BIP! Scholar enables hands-on experimentation.

Looking Ahead

The future of research assessment cannot be determined by declarations alone. It also depends on whether the research ecosystem can build practical infrastructures that make new evaluation approaches feasible. This is where platforms like BIP! Scholar become especially important. 

Our opinion is that, as discussions around responsible research assessment continue to evolve globally, the need for adaptable and transparent scholarly profiling systems will only grow. The new generation of BIP! Scholar shows that academic profiles can become much more than online CVs.

Interested in learning more? Read our recent preprint on the subject here.