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Perspectives from the co-founders of Haplo, now part of the Cayuse family

By Colette Akiki posted 03-23-2021 12:55

  
Joining forces with Haplo
I had an opportunity to sit down with two of the newest members of the Cayuse family, Jennifer and Ben Summers. The two are co-founders of London-based Haplo, which we’re happy to announce is now part of Cayuse. Founded in 2008, Haplo provides research information management solutions and has experienced incredible growth.


At Cayuse, we’re excited for many reasons to be joining forces with Haplo. Not only do they bring more innovative solutions to add to our cloud research administration suite, but Haplo brings researcher-centric products that will now be connected to that research suite, sitting on the Cayuse platform.

Software and tools for researchers

Below is just a summary of Jennifer and Ben’s perspectives in case you don’t have 10 minutes to listen to the whole interview.

Share a little about your background and how Haplo got started and has been growing
Haplo originally came out of Jennifer’s experience as a librarian. If you think of a library catalogue – being able to catalogue all the key details of every book and journal in a library so someone can really easily find the exact item they want – it occurred to me that if you took that principle and extended it to be able to catalogue everything in your working life – records of people, events, notes, equipment – how useful and interesting it would be to find things and see the relationships between them.

So that was the idea, but you need a much more flexible system to be able to record every useful detail of anything in your working life – hence the Haplo Platform was built – an incredibly flexible database with the capacity to reflect all the richness and interrelatedness of the ‘real world’ accurately and without compromise.
Around the same time Ben and Jennifer were talking to university libraries about the problems of managing research repositories and particularly the new challenge that emerged at that time of managing research data as a final output of research. They realized that not only was Haplo ideal technology for a research outputs repository, but it could also record all of the details of what research was taking place earlier in the research process. That led to building specialist functionality for supporting ethical review, preparation of funding grants, and supporting doctoral research programmes.

Tell us a little bit about your two researcher solutions since those will be newer aspects to the Cayuse Research Suite
Graduate Education Manager, formerly PhD Manager, supports Postgraduate Research programs in universities. Whereas student record systems are designed for managing cohorts of taught students, they are fundamentally unsuited to supporting postgraduate researchers who each follow an individual path – starting and stopping at different times, switching from part time to full time, suspending and extending their time. It’s a big challenge for universities to keep track of thousands of postgraduate researchers. PhD Manager provides them with a database of all their students, calculates the amount of time each student has to complete their degree, enables them to keep a record of supervision meetings held, supports the administration of annual progress reviews, and supports the lengthy examination process.

The Repository solution enables researchers to easily deposit the outcome of their research into their institutional repositories to enable the research to be found and hopefully re-used, adding to the sum of human knowledge. It’s packed with tools to make it easier for repository managers to prepare the outputs for deposit – supporting embargoes, access requests to restricted files, and applying open access and re-use licences. One thing we’re particularly good at is enabling researchers with non-text based outputs to easily share their research – repositories traditionally haven’t supported materials such as film, sound recordings, and artifacts very well – but Haplo can do this because of the flexibility in being able to richly represent the details of anything.

As you look to the year ahead, what makes you and the Haplo team most excited about being part of the Cayuse family?
Joining the Cayuse family provides the Haplo team with the opportunity to see Haplo’s products benefiting researchers in institutions across the globe.
We also chatted briefly about the underlying philosophies of the two companies being so similar, in that both companies were founded on the idea of reducing burden throughout the research process.

It sounds like they’re pretty excited. And we’re excited too because, like Cayuse, Ben and Jennifer are focused on empowering globally connected research and further supporting customers with innovative, intuitive tools that drive real impact on research.

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