Tell us a bit about your business, and how you got your idea or concept.
Neliti is a content management system (CMS) and website building tool for three types of academic content providers: institutional repositories, academic journals, and academic conferences.
Neliti currently powers over 1,000 university repositories, 3,000 journals and 70 conferences, to help them publish and manage academic content such as journal articles, books, research datasets, conference papers, theses and dissertations, and other types of research publications.
Our mission is to increase open access to scientific research. Content that has been uploaded using Neliti is viewed over 12 million times every month, mostly in the developing world. We’re quite proud to be helping academics from poorer countries access scientific knowledge. This helps them perform research that solves their nations’ respective challenges, like disease, food security, and economic inequality.
I started Neliti in 2015 while still a student at UWA. I was undertaking an overseas internship at the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta – an opportunity that was facilitated by UWA.
The Eijkman Institute is a very historic laboratory. It started way back in 1888 under Dutch colonial rule of Indonesia and it’s the only Indonesian institution to ever receive a Nobel prize. My research unit was trying to find emerging viruses in Indonesia. We were hunting for Ebola (which we never found), but we did find the first ever case of Zika virus in Indonesia, which was threatening global spread at the time. Very soon after, it was found in Australia too.
As we learnt during COVID-19, research about emerging viruses is extremely important for preventing pandemics and global catastrophes. The problem is, all the important data from our work at the Eijkman Institute was stored offline. We occasionally published the work in peer-reviewed journals, but that process took 6-12 months for the research to be made public.
I proposed that the work should be made available online sooner so that it can be accessed by local and international public health authorities. I therefore built Neliti as a small repository for my laboratory only, to upload our data publicly so that other researchers and health professionals can find it online and make use of it.
How did you get started and what has your journey looked like to date?
Soon after creating the website, I started receiving emails from other research institutes across Indonesia, who were asking if I could build a similar repository for them too. Instead of building each repository one by one, I just built a simple login function where they can self-serve by signing up, logging in, and uploading their papers.
Neliti expanded pretty rapidly after that, and entirely organically. Today, we serve over 1,000 institutions and receive millions of monthly users.
A huge part of this has been the help we received from the National Library of Indonesia. They saw Neliti as an important stepping stone for the digitalisation of academic content in Indonesia, and they helped us out hugely through promotions and partnerships. They even gave us free office space in their building, so that we can collaborate with them more closely.
What is your background (education/work/experience) and how has it helped you on your journey?
I undertook a BSc at UWA, with a first major in Anatomy & Human Biology and a second major in Indonesian Studies. In many ways, it was the perfect combination to build Neliti: studying life sciences helped me understand the academic publishing process, while looking at scientific research through an Indonesian lens enabled me to identify interesting problems in Indonesia that Neliti can solve.
This is one of the things I love about UWA – the mixing and matching of different disciplines. I find it interesting how people with backgrounds in one discipline can enter the industry of another discipline and bring unique solutions that other industry natives haven’t considered previously.
I was fortunate enough to work with some amazing professors too, who helped me publish four academic journal articles during my UWA degree. This helped me understand the academic publishing and peer review systems quite well and allowed me to see the challenges that the current status quo poses to developing countries.
Where do you see your business in the next five years?
We're currently really popular in Indonesia and have worked with almost every major Indonesian institution. For the next five years, we want to focus on expanding geographically to other developing countries. We've already received some users from other developing countries, including Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and dozens of others. We're a bit spoilt for choice on which countries to focus on, and 2023 will be focused on an expansion strategy.
Longer term, we want to build more innovative solutions that improve academic publishing in general. For example, we believe peer review hasn’t changed much in 100 years, and we’ve got some pretty cool ideas on how to revolutionise the peer review process.
To what do you attribute your success?
Success is multifactorial, it’s a combination of many things both within and outside our control: hard work, luck, networks and helping hands from others, consistency, persistence, passion, strategy and more.
But I would attribute a large chunk of it to the people who I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded by, who squeezed any ounce of potential out of me: my educators at UWA, my supervisors during research projects at UWA and abroad, scholarship providers like UWA and the Australian government, my awesome team at Neliti, who constantly inspire and build creative solutions to the multitude of challenges that we face. My Indonesian professor at UWA, Dr David Bourchier, was a particularly big influence in my life. He really championed UWA’s Indonesian programme and has produced some outstanding alumni.
UWA as a university has been instrumental. UWA’s unique course structure allows students to pursue a diverse range of passions. For me, majoring in seemingly unrelated subjects – life sciences and Asian studies – fostered a unique skill set. My experience at UWA was one of subject diversity and international openness. They are very open to providing credit for overseas work/study and are extremely flexible in catering to students’ international ambitions. In my case, I received credit for an internship in Jakarta and studied abroad in Los Angeles, Yogyakarta, and Singapore. This in itself developed a deeper cultural understanding and an ability to operate in new and changing environments.
Words of wisdom 
Get out of UWA. No, I don’t mean quit your degree! I mean leave UWA physically for overseas opportunities, which will contribute credit towards your degree. Approach your faculty advisors and see what student exchange, overseas internship, international scholarship, and other opportunities are available to you.
For me, UWA didn’t just allow, but pushed for, various credit-bearing adventures to Asia. The diverse range of skills developed, and the international experience gained, have clearly translated into my business. Research on tropical diseases in Indonesia couldn’t be performed without strong scientific knowledge combined with Indonesian linguistic and cultural fluency. The development and growth of my company wouldn’t be possible without a thorough understanding of the science industry and the communication gaps that exist in Indonesia’s research sector. These are all things I learnt at UWA, and I don’t think many other universities can provide this type of education.
About Anton
Anton Lucanus is the Founder & CEO of Neliti. He holds a Bsc (Hons) from the University of Western Australia, majoring in Anatomy & Human Biology and Indonesian Studies.