Case Study: Scicasts achieves democratized access to scientific research and scalable big-data analytics with Rackspace Technology

Democratizing Science Through Big Data with Rackspace

Scicasts, founded in 2009 by biomedical scientist Tim El‑Sheikh, is a searchable platform that indexes research papers, journals and scientific news to “democratize science.” As the site grew to hundreds of thousands of users, it faced two major challenges: keeping up with the massive and continuously expanding volume of scientific literature (millions of papers annually) and supporting rapid traffic growth with only a lean in‑house team and limited IT expertise.

Scicasts partnered with Rackspace to migrate to an OpenStack public cloud and implement Apache Hadoop, supplemented by recruited mathematics experts to run the analytics. The move delivered scalable, reliable infrastructure and faster, more efficient indexing that improved user search experiences, enabled new market‑research insights and targeted advertising revenue, and supported continued global growth (300,000 users in 135 countries and 30 million engagements) with planned expansion into Asia.

Scicasts

El-Sheikh

Founder and CEO