Unlocking research potential: An interview with Paul Tuinenburg

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At Kriyadocs, we are always excited to engage with industry leaders who are driving innovation in scholarly publishing. Recently, Jason had the opportunity to speak with Paul Tuinenburg, co-founder of Global Campus. Paul’s expertise in leveraging AI-driven matchmaking for research funding and peer review is reshaping how universities and publishers navigate scholarly communication.

In their discussion, they explored the origins of Global Campus, its collaboration with Kriyadocs, and the evolving role of AI in the industry. Here’s what Paul had to say.

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Global Campus – The origin

How did the idea for Global Campus come about?

Paul: We were already working with universities for roughly 10 years on topics of societal impact of research and grant writing. In those years, we increasingly started working with matchmaking algorithms that we use in two different ways:

• Matching research ideas with project databases of national funders to inform researchers about already funded research. This is relevant because most funders don’t like to fund the same idea twice.

• Matching internal university data with funding opportunities. Really valuable because this was manual work. Matching 2000 researchers with thousands of funding opportunities in one go obviously saves time.

Especially for the second use case, it took a lot of effort to receive the internal data from the university, so it was a wish for a long time to use public data for matching but for many years the quality just wasn’t efficient. And then OpenAlex started in 2022. Within a few months we had a working product to match people with funding opportunities and after that we soon realized there was so much potential that we decided to build an entire new platform around the technology: Global Campus.
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Peer review and AI

The collaboration between Global Campus and Kriyadocs is designed to use your advanced semantic search and content matching capabilities to deliver potential peer review candidates to editors using the Kriyadocs platform. How do you see these capabilities developing in the future?

Paul: There are so many capabilities we would like to develop, but I will highlight one of our ideas. Which is that we would really like to see an implementation where we can help publishers to get more response from their invitations by adding the relevant publications of people into the invitation. When looking for a peer reviewer for a manuscript on photosynthesis, today's practice is usually to invite people by complimenting them on their work and asking them to peer review. We think it would work better if you could specifically tell them that we have a manuscript, very much in line with 3 of their own publications (insert DOIs), and then invite them to peer review.
 

AI’s impact on scholarly publishing

The use (and misuse) of AI in scholarly publishing is a hot topic right now. How do you see the use of AI in our industry developing?  

Paul: This is a big question for every industry I guess. Coming from working with universities, I really like the willingness to experiment in scholarly publishing. I am aware that many in the industry think this is a conservative industry and that might be true. But the bureaucracy we have seen in universities is unbelievable, which leads to a total inertia in adopting new technologies. With publishers, at least we see a willingness to experiment with AI technology to figure out how it can improve the process.  

Our hope for AI is that it will level the playing field, for example for non-native English speakers, and will help convey the essence of good science. But a worry is that it will be used increasingly to muddy the waters, and try to upcycle less impactful science into ever more papers. I am skeptical about the application of generative AI to do peer review, as the models are currently not capable of finding errors in their own output, let alone finding them in through scientific work. 
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Breakthroughs in AI and NLP

What game-changing developments do you see coming through in AI and NLP?

Paul: My colleague Tijmen pointed me at generative models in specific disciplines, like successors to AlphaFold. The most game-changing developments might actually be in that field, modelling the behavior of cells, to help us understand life and the development of diseases. And not in the field of language and text.

Generally speaking, it’s quite scary to see how little we as humanity understand about these generative models. Hopefully there will be huge developments in the coming years in the AI disciplines of interpretability and explainability of AI models.
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Challenges in entrepreneurship

You recently co-hosted a podcast focusing on challenges faced by entrepreneurs. Can you share some of the struggles you have experienced as an entrepreneur, and how you overcame them?

Paul: One of the main challenges is keeping balance. Balance between personal life and business, but within the business the balance between exploiting business models that work and exploring new avenues. Over the years I learned to focus more on the stuff that works (and pays the bills), but especially in my first years as an entrepreneur I wanted to work on everything that seemed to be interesting. Funnily enough, I think I got better at balancing these things at work since I got children. I don’t have the time anymore to read and think about some crazy new ideas. There is so much work at home with small children that I have to focus on my role as an entrepreneur as well.
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A wish for 2025

If you had a magic wand, what one big thing would you wish for in 2025?

Paul: Let’s focus on my business wishes for 2025 here. Which would be onboarding more funders and publishers to help them finding better reviewers and validating use cases in universities.  
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Our conversation with Paul highlighted the incredible potential of AI-driven matchmaking in scholarly publishing, the opportunities and challenges AI presents, and the importance of balance in entrepreneurial ventures. It was a pleasure to feature his insights, and we look forward to seeing how Global Campus continues to evolve.

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Stay tuned for more conversations with industry leaders!