EPICommunity Platform: Towards an Academic Social Network Designed for Researchers by Researchers

Existing academic social networks for researchers do not currently address the multitude of their tasks and diverse needs. This paper presents the EPICommunity platform, a social network for researchers designed by researchers. The EPICommunity platform aims to support researchers, particularly early career researchers, to connect with peers, showcase their work and collaborate and create groups. To this end, it provides unique features compared to existing systems, such as Europass profile interoperability, recommendations for researchers with similar interests based on various criteria, gamification mechanics, analytics to monitor researchers’ own progress and a multi-dimensional set of researchers’ assessment criteria, both quantitative and qualitative. The EPICommunity platform follows a human-centered development model. This paper presents its first iteration. Real-world user requirements were produced from three workshops with 17 researchers from 8 European Universities. Prototypes were also developed and evaluated in these workshops. Finally, a formative expert-based usability evaluation study was conducted. To this end, the heuristic evaluation method was employed involving five experienced usability experts.