About DataSeer

Uncover. Advise. Monitor.

DataSeer fills the urgent need for low-cost, scalable solutions to measure open science, show researchers how to comply with policy, and deploy just-in-time interventions.

Founder and CEO Tim Vines conceived DataSeer while manually checking data policy compliance for the journal Molecular Ecology. Instead of going through each article line-by-line for 30 minutes or more, he wondered, why not have Artificial Intelligence do the same job in seconds?

In 2019, he started DataSeer with a grant from the Sloan Foundation, and a vision for a tool that would help data-sharing practice keep pace with the demands of data-sharing policy. Using Natural Language Processing, DataSeer’s Compliance Checks soon made it possible for publishers and funders to precisely monitor compliance with their open science policies, while offering researchers clear guidance on exactly how to fulfill requirements.

And we didn’t stop there. In 2022 DataSeer added Open Science Monitoring, which provides a top-level summary of open science practice across a large corpus of articles, and in 2024 introduced SnapShot, a real time scan that allows journals to triage manuscripts for open science practice in seconds.

DataSeer is the winner of the 2022 Society for Scholarly Publishing People’s Choice Award for Best Innovation. We were shortlisted for the ALPSP innovation awards in both 2020 and 2025, and included in Outsell’s Emerging 50 of 2023, and STM Innovation Day

Our Advisors

Meet our expert advisory board

DataSeer relies on the insight and advice of open data leaders from across our industry, including researchers, editors, librarians, and entrepreneurs.

Nokome Bentley

Founder, Stencila

Nokome was originally a marine scientist with over twenty years experience in research for sustainable management of marine resources. He is the Founder of Stencila, which produces living documents that link tables and plots to the underlying datasets. It serves a platform for reproducible research that bridges the gap in collaboration between coders and non-coders. Nokome is based in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Theo Bloom

Executive Editor, BMJ

Theo has a PhD in developmental cell biology from the University of Cambridge, and moved into publishing as an editor on the biology team at Nature. After a number of years helping to develop Current Biology for Current Science Group and then for Elsevier, Theo was instrumental in the birth of the commercial open access publisher BioMed Central. She joined the non-profit open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) in 2008, initially as chief editor of PLOS Biology. She has been a leader on issues around data access and availability for many years.

Phil Bourne

Founding Dean, School of Data Science, University of Virginia

From 2014-2017, Phil was the Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health. In this role he led the Big Data to Knowledge Program, coordinating access to and analyzing biomedical research from across the globe and making it available to scientists and researchers. He has done exceptional work to make biomedical research accessible, as well as to advance the field of data science. Prior to his time at the NIH, Phil spent 20 years on the faculty at the University of California-San Diego, eventually becoming Associate Vice Chancellor of Innovation and Industrial Alliances.

Erin Clary

Curation Coordinator, Portage Network

Erin is the Curation Coordinator for the Portage Network, an initiative of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, now supported by Canada’s New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (NDRIO). She reviews new dataset deposits for the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR), and as a member of Portage’s Curation Expert Group, she is engaged in developing resources to support a national curation community of practice.

Kristen Ratan

Founder, Strategies for Open Science

Kristen Ratan is a seasoned executive and open science advocate with 20+ years leading transformation in scholarly research and research communication. Kristen has a successful track record creating and driving vision, strategy and technology innovations in research, knowledge production, discovery and access. She co-founded the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (Coko) and was Publisher at PLOS prior to that.

Jason Roberts

Senior Partner, Origin Editorial

After earning a doctorate in Geography from Loughborough University, Jason worked at Blackwell Science in Oxford, UK. He switched to the editorial team and eventually rose to be Senior Editor of US-based medical journals. In 2010 he left Blackwell to found Origin Editorial, offering his journal management expertise to a much wider range of journals. Jason was the founding president of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors. He works closely with the EQUATOR Network to encourage improved reporting standards among journals, editors, and publishers.

Heather Staines

Director of Community Engagement and Senior Consultant at Delta Think

Before joining DeltaThink, Heather was Head of Partnerships for the Knowledge Futures Group, building open source infrastructure for publishers and libraries. Her previous roles include positions at Hypothesis, Proquest, SIPX (formerly the Stanford Intellectual Property Exchange), Springer SBM, and Greenwood Publishing Group/Praeger Publishers. She is a frequent speaker and participant at industry events including the COUNTER Board of Directors, the STM Futurelab, Society for Scholarly Publishing, the NISO Transfer Standing Committee, the NASIG Digital Preservation Task Force. She has a Ph.D. in Military and Diplomatic History from Yale University.

Patrice Lopez

LLM Engineer

Patrice is a global expert on the application of Machine Learning to research articles. His previous projects include the pdf to TEI converter Grobid and the Deep Learning Framework For Text (DeLFT). He develops DataSeer’s core Machine Learning algorithms and is currently integrating LLM-based technology.