Ulysseus launches Match4Cooperation, the social network to connect researchers across the alliance

The aim of the professional network is to create a research community to exchange on their work and collaborate on EU calls and other public or private opportunities.

Ulysseus launches Match4Cooperation, the social network to connect researchers across the alliance

At the occasion of the Summit in Nice, Ulysseus European University is launching its new social network for researchers: Match4Cooperation (M4C), an open-source tool that aims to be a social network to connect all Ulysseus academics, raise equal awareness of EU research project calls and promote research mobility within Ulysseus.

Representatives of the six partner universities (University of Seville; University of Genoa; Université Cotê D’Azur; Technical University of Košice; MCI | The Entrepreneurial School and Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences) and representatives of the new full partners that will join Ulysseus in the next Erasmus+ 2023 proposal (University of Münster and University of Montenegro) learnt today how M4C works during the first working day of the Summit in Nice.

Match4Cooperation, a social network powered by Mastodon technology and code, allows researchers to share their work content, react to each other’s achievements and have personal conversations in a secure environment.

There are multiple social research networks competing for the participation and attention of academics, but all of them are privately owned and allow for a low level of control and personalisation by the participating institutions. Therefore, M4C has been created to make the academic community of the alliance feel as connected as possible across institutional and linguistic barriers.

European projects

A very important measure of Ulysseus’ success is based on the ability to respond to and win EU calls for research projects. To achieve this goal, Innovation Hubs and other research stakeholders within the alliance are using the Match4Cooperation application to communicate European calls to which the Ulysseus community could apply.

In this sense, researchers will find a specific group on M4C – @projects – where all open projects can be seen, accessed and engaged with. The Innovation Hub managers will publish every Monday the updated list of projects looking for partners in the alliance, and interested users will be able to respond and connect to participate. Researchers can also publish their own projects if they are looking for partners.

Open Science Competition in M4C

As a special event to celebrate the launch of M4C, Ulysseus is offering the opportunity to send two young researchers to a conference of their choice with the only requirement that they are currently enrolled as students at an institution of higher education or have obtained their PhD within the last 5 years at the time of entering this competition.

Participants must publish a link to a peer-reviewed open access publication in the last 3 years in which they are first or last author in their M4C profile. The first winner will be determined by the number of times their article is shared -re-tooted – on M4C, while the second winner will be the person whose peer-reviewed article has been cited -tooted- the most.

All the information about this competition and M4C is available here.

About Ulysseus

Ulysseus is one of the 44 European Universities selected by the European Commission to become the universities of the future. Led by the University of Seville together with five other universities in Europe (the University of Genoa, Italy; Université Côte d’Azur, France; the Technical University of Košice, Slovakia; MCI | The Entrepreneurial School®, Austria; and Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, Finland), the project will allow students, researchers and graduates to move freely between universities, carry out internships in companies and start high-impact research projects.