Research deserves a home.
Without the gatekeeping.

Why We Built Expertini Research

The impetus for this platform came from a place many researchers know intimately. Dr Ahsan Habibi Syed, while pursuing doctoral research in cybersecurity investment planning at De Montfort University, found himself navigating a publishing landscape that felt increasingly misaligned with the actual pace of research. Journals moved slowly. Preprint servers in his field felt either too narrow or too dominated by established institutional voices. Meaningful work — particularly from independent researchers, practitioners, and students in non-Western institutions — often went unarchived, uncited, and unseen.

The academic publishing system, for all its value, carries structural barriers that are easy to overlook if you have always been inside a well-resourced institution. Article processing charges can run into thousands of dollars per paper. Peer review cycles routinely stretch beyond twelve months. Pre-submission requirements demand institutional affiliation. Embargo periods delay public access to publicly funded research by years.

None of these barriers exist to protect research quality. They exist because of how the publishing industry evolved — and they disproportionately exclude the researchers who have the least margin for error: early-career academics, researchers in lower-income countries, practitioners working outside universities, and students whose work deserves an audience even before it clears a peer review queue.

Expertini, having spent over fifteen years building technology to connect people with opportunities across 150+ countries, was well placed to do something about it. We already had the infrastructure, the global reach, and the technical capability. What the world needed was a platform that treated research sharing the way it should be treated: as a public good, not a subscription service.

Who Publishes Here

Expertini Research is deliberately open to four types of researchers. We do not require institutional affiliation. We do not charge submission fees. We do not discriminate by geography, career stage, or employment status. What we ask is that submissions are genuine intellectual contributions, honestly represented.

Our Connection to Expertini

Expertini Research is operated by Expertini — a global AI-powered job search and recruitment platform established in 2008, serving over 700,000 monthly users through 251 country-specific domains and more than 35 specialised job verticals. The platform operates at the intersection of technology and human employment: it is, at its core, a company that has spent nearly two decades thinking about how people and knowledge move through the world.

That experience shapes how we think about research publishing. We have seen how proprietary algorithms in hiring exclude candidates who do not fit narrow templates. We have seen how closed-access research on labour markets and AI systems shapes policy without ever reaching the practitioners those policies affect. Expertini Research is, in part, a response to those observations.

Expertini has itself contributed to the research literature — with papers on cybersecurity investment optimisation on the go with De Montfort University, and with industry research on AI-driven recruitment systems that has informed platform development across our network. We understand the publishing process from the inside, and we built this repository to serve researchers the way we would have wanted to be served when our own work was looking for a home.

Our Principles