Interview
Combining twin passions
Sami Benchekroun explains how a love of entrepreneurship and scholarly communications have shaped his career
Tell us a little about your background and qualifications… I first became intrigued by the world of scholarly communications when I was an undergraduate at university studying information and communication management. As a side job, my good friend (and now co-founder) Justus Weweler and I worked as IT consultants at academic conferences across Europe. As we travelled from conference to conference, I realised that they all had a similar format and were largely restricted to the offline realm, disconnected from scholarly communications as a whole. I was shocked to see how much valuable knowledge was lost every time a researcher rolled up their poster and took it home with them at the end of a meeting. I continued to work at meetings while
completing my masters of science and management at ESCP Europe, all the while thinking of ideas to improve the conference experience for both attendees and sponsoring organisations. When I neared the end of my degree, I decided to focus my energy on this and pursue a career that combined my two passions: entrepreneurship and scholarly communications. I wanted to build a technology company that would help improve the efficiency and transparency of the research process and have a positive impact on the scientific ecosystem as a whole. Together with Justus, we launched
Morressier in 2014 and over the past six years have grown the company into the world’s leading platform for early-stage research. Today, we work with more than 200
societies, institutions, and research organisations to support their virtual
26 Research Information August/September 2020
“ We founded Morressier to bridge the gap between academic
conferences and scholarly
communications”
and hybrid conferences and disseminate their resulting early-stage research. I’m very proud of the team that we have built around the world and I love working with them to tackle new challenges that arise in our industry.
What is Morressier, and how does it fit in with the scholarly communications industry? We founded Morressier to bridge the gap between academic conferences and scholarly communications. Our goal is to support impactful virtual and hybrid conferences and increase the value they offer attendees, members, societies, and the broader scholarly community. We provide a suite of software tools and custom integrations that help organisations display, host, and fully integrate the abstracts, posters, presentations, and proceedings from their conferences. Understanding the need for conferences and early-stage research preservation to be sustainable, we also offer our partners the ability to monetise this content and generate new
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