About us
A foundation built around one stubborn idea.
That research belongs to everyone who paid for it — and that the distance between a published study and the people it could help is far too wide.
Where we come from
Stichting United Academics Foundation was established in Amsterdam in January 2013 by Louis Lapidaire, Robert Paul Kuiper and Anouk Vleugels. It grew out of a simple frustration: scientific knowledge, largely produced with public money, had become the raw material of a highly profitable subscription industry.
More than a decade later the foundation still runs lean. A small board and an international team of writers, developers and volunteers work remotely across several continents on the same objective — getting research out from behind the paywall and into the hands of the people who can use it.
Our mission
We connect science and society. In practice that means two things: making peer-reviewed research freely available, and making it readable. Access without comprehension is only half the job, so alongside open access infrastructure we invest in translating research into plain language for a general audience.
What we stand for
- Open by default. Publicly funded research should be publicly readable, without a subscription or an institutional login.
- Readable, not just available. A paper nobody outside the field can parse is not truly accessible.
- Independent. We hold no commercial stake in the publishing market we are trying to change.
- Accountable. As a registered ANBI we publish our governance, policy and finances in full.
How we are organised
The foundation is governed by an unpaid board of three. Day-to-day work is carried out by a distributed team and by volunteers who contribute writing, editing and development time. Board composition, our policy plan and our financial statements are published on the governance page.
Get involved
There is more work than there are hands. We are always interested in hearing from researchers willing to advise on open publishing models, writers who can turn a study into a story, software developers who can help rebuild our open access library, and institutions or funders who want to support open access in a concrete way.