When Joe Morone, Jon Warman and Diana Brazzell were dorm mates at Brown University, they shared a vision of the importance of higher education and academic research, but they also knew that research, detailed in academic journals, could often be long, dense and inaccessible to the general public.
So in the fall of 2011, years after their graduation, they founded Footnote, a startup that collaborates with scholars to translate the most technical language into layman's terms — a CliffsNotes, if you will, for academic journals.
"Every year, 1.6 million articles are published in academic journals, but once the research is published, very few people end up seeing it because it's written for an audience of peers," Morone said.
"Our goal is to be a conduit between academic research and intellectually curious readers, policymakers, entrepreneurs and educators."
To do that, Footnote's editorial team works with researchers from Harvard, MIT, Yale and some of the nation's other top universities to craft articles based on those found in academic journals.
Subjects range broadly, from what happens to children when a parent goes to prison, to whether government should intervene to make people healthier.
"We look for issues we think are important and that can be impacted by the latest research," said Morone, whose company was named one of 128 MassChallenge finalists earlier this year.
"The challenge is how do we make better use of this information? We want to deliver brilliant research and expertise on issues that matter in a way that people can use."
Jesse Lyons, a postdoctoral researcher in systems biology at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital, has written Footnote articles on multiple subjects, including how light affects the brain, whether stem cells offer a cure for deafness, and whether a drug that decreases sperm count in mice could lead to a birth control pill for men.
"The goal is to make specialized academic research accessible and engaging without losing the complexity," Lyons explained.
"We want to make it understandable without dumbing it down."
Footnote is partnering with the College and University Research Collaborative in Providence, where top policymakers in Rhode Island have gone with questions about economic development.
The collaborative takes their questions to researchers, whose answers Footnote then translates.
"It's absolutely so important to the work we're doing," said Amber Gilfert, the collaborative's program director.
"We see Footnote providing that key piece, taking research and putting it into a format that our policy leaders and community can easily understand," Gilfert said.
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