Responding to the spin in Inospin
Dear Claire
Thank you for your message.
You tell me that you have reviewed my research, and yet you feel I would be in a good position to submit a research proposal on canine cancer cell lines to your pharma company.
I cannot see how anyone who genuinely had reviewed my research/publications and was in any way competent to undertake this kind of search on behalf of an industrial partner could possibly have come to that conclusion.
I had intended to suggest that, assuming you would are both honest and competent, you might wish to explain on what basis you feel my research makes me a suitable candidate for this kind of work. However, checking my email records, I find I sent you a similar email when you invited me to propose a project about manufacturing connectors for textiles and composite foils that would not change the thickness while maintaining flexibility for the automotive industry, which I do not yet seem (?) to have received a reply to. That invitation was also supposedly based on your looking at my research. I struggle to see how you could feel my research is relevant to either of these fields, let alone both of them.
You also claimed to have looked at my research when you 'reached out' to me when you had been "asked by an innovative specialty pharma company to look for proposals on the interspecies transmission of Covid-19 from academics…" (which seemed somewhat unfair to academics).
So, I hope you will understand why I will be dismissing your footer informing me that "any unauthorized review, copying, disclosure or any other use of this information is strictly prohibited" as I suspect that is intended to deter scholars from warning each other that Inospin is not a reputable company that follows careful ethical procedures, but rather that although you present as tagetting your marketing based on scrutiny of researchers' areas of work, this is not true and you are simply sending out spam.
Best wishes
Keith
Dear Claire
Thank you for the invitation.
I am really intrigued. I would be really fascinated to know what it was, in "Looking at [my] research", that prompted you to reach out to me in particular for help with "connectors for textiles and composite foils that would not change the thickness while maintaining flexibility"?
(Whilst I at least understand what "stable, flexible connectors for textiles and composite foils (PVC, TPO, PU)" means, I struggle to appreciate in what sense these connectors might also be quick: "quick, stable, flexible connectors for textiles and composite foils (PVC, TPO, PU)".)
Best wishes
Keith
Addenda
Keith,
Thank you very much for sharing your experience! I received their email earlier and thought it could be an opportunity because I would like to explore the applications they mentioned. After knowing your experience, I think I would not bother to waste my time on any interactions with them.
Best,
Yu
Hi Yu
Inospin presumably has potential clients seeking research partners. These clients will be looking to pay Inospin some kind of fee for doing the specialised work of identifying researchers/groups well qualified to take on particular projects. (I assume the fee only gets paid when the client is introduced to a possible partner the client recognises as worth engaging with.) However, it seems Inospin is either too lazy to do that, or just does not have capability (either lack of resources, or lack of know-how), and seems to instead send out blanket invitations as spam email hoping enough of them will reach interested parties to save them actually doing any work to target the most appropriate researchers.
If they have sent you news of a project which genuinely matches your expertise (even if more by luck than judgement) then if you respond they may well pass on your details to the client. But I suspect from my experience that they will have also sent the same invitation to a great many other researchers who are completely unsuitable for that project!
They claim on their website to be the "The #1 partnering network for scientific innovations". If so, I can only imagine what their competitors must be like. They also claim to have "2.5 million scientific experts in life sciences, chemistry, material sciences and engineering" – that is a lot of researchers to have profiled. I suspect in reality it simply means they have a database of that many email addresses tagged by some web-crawling algorithm that identifies key terms completely independently of their context. Certainly no intelligence is at work in this kind of activity, given the wide range of fields where I have been told I have some kind of expertise or even eminence (https://science-education-research.com/about-keith/)!
Best wishes,
Keith
Keith,
They also contacted me to submit a proposal related to mitochondrial function and mitophagy. They said it is from AstraZeneca. I actually called AZ US and their grant department said they never called for this type of research. I have no idea what they want to do, and think we should ask for NDA before sending them the proposal.