As former academic people, we know exactly what research looks like in (French) universities or national institutes. Despite our past, since the moment we have created our company, we lost our legitimacy in front of our peers. This open letter intends to explain our motivations.

Dear Academia,

When I left you, after 12 years as a student, lecturer and then research engineer, my first motivation was clearly to discover what a professional life could be outside from the university. After a three-years experience in running a small communication agency, in constant interaction with the research ecosystem, it appeared clearly that I needed to create a new company that help scientists to structure and share their work. William — a precious friend with whom I share values — decided to be part of this adventure and TailorDev is born.

From the beginning, our primary motivation is to be involved in the Open Science movement. As developers, we know precisely the main benefits of the Open Source initiative that can be applied to science: quality, reproducibility, freedom and flexibility.

As you obviously already know, Science is in times of crisis, suffering from its publication / evaluation system. We strongly believe that opening science is the key to motivate 21st century scientists to roll-back to their primary intents: doing science to understand and improve the world they live in and not doing science to publish into Nature or Science.

With this belief in mind, we will build tools that drive researchers to the road to openness. As we already did, we will continue to spread the word and give 101 talks about Open Science. Because believe me, this movement is far from being known nor understand by most researchers both from your side and the Industry.

But. We are a company. It means that you look at us as sharks ready to bite your money rather than just human beings willing to contribute to the common scientific goods, just as you do. By founding TailorDev, in your eyes, it appears that we have lost our legitimacy.

Is this fair? As we already mentioned in a previous post, at this time, we are not motivated in burning a huge amount of public or private investors’ money to achieve our goal; we want to create a reliable and ethic business. Like you, we all have bills to honor and mouths to feed by the end of the month. So yes, we will probably ask you to pay for the time we spent working with you or for the services you are using. But, this does not change who we are and what we (will) fight for.

I really hope you will hear my request. Let’s do better Science together. We are on the same side: the open one.

With love.