The following exciting press release has just been made available by Research Research and the Apereo Foundation:

Jan. 28, 2014 - LONDON, U.K. -- Research Professional, one of the world's leading information services for reseachers, has joined the Apereo Open Academic Environment, one of the academic world's most innovative open source software projects.

Research Professional's UK parent company, Research Research Limited, has joined the OAE project board and will provide free hosting for universities that want to deploy the OAE for their staff and students. It will also roll out the OAE for free to its existing 300 customers around the world.

“The OAE is the most exciting development in higher education software since Learning Management Systems,” said William Cullerne Bown, Research Research Limited's executive chairman, today. “It provides a free-flowing space for collaborating and networking both within and between institutions. Students and researchers love its intuitive feel and how easy it is to get things done.”

The University of Cambridge, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Marist College are among the initial innovators who have been leading the OAE project. Early adopters include ESUP-Portail, a consortium of leading universities in France.

Until now, universities have had to choose,” said John Norman, director of the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technology at the University of Cambridge. “They could have open source software they control – but only if they consigned themselves to a silo. Or they could stay out of the silo – but only by ceding control of critical information to commercial vendors.”

“Now the Open Academic Environment gives universities the best of both worlds. All the data on the OAE is owned and controlled by your own university. Everyone can share, so there are no silos. And it's built to scale up to millions of users.”

The Open Academic Environment was recently rated ‘one to watch' in Edutechnica's top ten developments of 2013.

Research Professional provides universities with news about research policy and access to a database of tens of thousands funding opportunities for researchers. It is used by hundreds of thousands of researchers around the world.

The Open Academic Environment project is supported by the Apereo Foundation, formed by the merger of Jasig and the Sakai Foundation in 2012. Apereo is the higher education world's hub for the development and adoption of open source software with high-profile communities in the US, Japan, China, Africa and Europe.

Apereo Foundation at http://www.apereo.org
Research Research Limited at http://www.researchresearch.com
OAE Project at http://www.oaeproject.org

Contact: Nicolaas Matthijs, OAE Project Director
+44 (0) 7580 693617
nicolaas.matthijs@caret.cam.ac.uk