Inist
- Company typePrivate
- Founded1989
- HeadquartersVandoeuvre-lès-nancy, France
- Headcount501–1,000
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
Inist firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Inist
- Legal name
- Inist - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique
- Website
- https://inist.fr
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 1989
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 501–1,000 employees
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Inist industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Scientific Information Infrastructure
- NAICS
- Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services (5416), Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services (54169), Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services (51929)
- SIC
- Services-Commercial Physical & Biological Research (8731), Services-Engineering, Accounting, Research, Management (8700), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Scientific Data Management & Data Platforms (SDMS/Data Lakehouse for R&D) (HLAGAJAC)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Scientific & Laboratory Reference (Chemistry, Biology, Physics; Methods & Protocols) (EDAGAGAG), Content Governance, Compliance, Retention & eDiscovery (HDAEAGAJ)
Keywords
Where Inist is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Vandoeuvre-lès-nancy
- HQ country
- France
- HQ region
- Europe
Offices1 record
Markets served
Inist business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Operations, Marketing or Sales
Revenue model
- Public Research Funding (CNRS): Inist is a CNRS research unit (UAR 76). All services are provided free of charge to the French higher education and research community, funded through French public research budgets and national science open policy mandates. No commercial revenue streams.
Distribution channels5 records
Marketing channels7 records
Inist product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Inist (Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique) is a CNRS research support unit (UAR 76) that operates a national scientific information infrastructure for the French higher education and research community. It provides free access to scientific literature through BibCNRS, the ISTEX corpus of 30M+ full-text documents, and the Click & Read browser extension linking 80+ partner institutions. Its portfolio includes text and data mining tools (TDM Factory, Istex TDM web services), multilingual scientific terminologies (Loterre), data management planning (OPIDoR), data visualization (Lodex), and usage measurement (Readmetrics/ezMESURE), all aligned with FAIR and open science principles.
Product overview
Inist (Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique) operates as CNRS's scientific information infrastructure providing a comprehensive portfolio of products organized around document access, text mining, and research data management. The core offerings include BibCnrs for digital library access, ISTEX as the scientific literature database with 30+ million documents, and the TDM Factory interface providing user-friendly text mining tools. The Loterre platform offers multilingual scientific terminology resources, while Lodex enables data visualization. Click & Read is a browser extension for unified document access, OPIDoR/DMP supports data management planning, and DoRANum provides e-learning on research data practices. ReadMetrics measures resource usage, and HAL-CNRS enables open archive publication sharing. These products are designed to work together as an integrated open science infrastructure.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- ISTEX: Infrastructure for scientific text and corpus access, providing over 30 million documents and TDM tools for the French research community
- BibCNRS
- Click & Read
- Loterre
- OPIDoR
- DoRANum
- Lodex
- TDM Factory
- Readmetrics
Products and services
- BibCNRS Digital library portal providing access to electronic resources, databases, and scientific publications for CNRS users and partner institutions. Offers optimized homepage, advanced search, database browser, and improved full-text access.
- ISTEX - Textes & Corpus Scientific literature database with over 30 million documents providing full-text access for text mining (TDM) projects in French higher education and research. Includes Istex Search, Istex Data, Istex Corpus, Istex Lodex, Istex TDM web services, Istex IA Factory, Istex Tools catalogue, and Istex Loterre.
- Click & Read Browser extension (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Brave, Edge) that scans web pages for document identifiers (DOI, PMID, PII) and displays a C&R button linking to accessible full-text from multiple institutional sources including Unpaywall, ISTEX, PANIST, and institutional repositories. Over 80 partner institutions.
- TDM Factory User-friendly web interface enabling researchers without advanced IT skills to perform text and data mining on scientific corpora. Offers tools for information extraction, automatic content enrichment, and text structuring, including bibCheck, textSummarize, diseaseTag, Teeft, and speciesTag services.
- Loterre (Linked Open Terminology Resources) Platform for exposing, querying, and downloading scientific multilingual terminologies. Offers over 74 terminologies with more than 765,000 concepts, accessible via API REST, SPARQL endpoint, and SKOS/RDF, CSV, PDF, JSON-LD downloads. Supports FAIR principles and linked open data standards.
- Lodex Open-source software for transforming and visualizing data as websites. Allows users to create data exploration and visualization sites without configuration or technical knowledge. Launched a catalogue of ready-to-use models in 2026, with the OpenAlex model as the first entry.
- OPIDoR Tool for writing Data Management Plans (DMP/PGD), guiding researchers through the data lifecycle, facilitating reuse of information, and encouraging good practices such as unique identifiers and controlled vocabularies.
- DoRANum E-learning platform providing training resources on research data management, data management plans, and good practices for the research community.
- Readmetrics / ezMESURE Service for measuring and analyzing usage of subscribed documentary resources by institutions, enabling evidence-based negotiation of licensing agreements.
- Bibliometric Analyses Expert service producing bibliometric indicators and thematic analyses for research laboratories and scientific domains. Includes statistical processing of bibliographic reference corpora, graphical reporting, scientific activity characterization, documentary monitoring, and expert identification on specific topics.
Quantifiable outcome
- 30M+ scientific documents available for text mining and corpus analysis
- +3 more outcomes
Companies that use Inist
Customer profileNamed customers1 record
Segments4 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Inist technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration11 records
AI capability9 records
Feature10 records
Inist partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Eleven partnerships are on record, tiered core and minor.
- IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse)coreCollaboration with IRIT and Guillaume Cabanac (IRIT) to develop bibCheck, a TDM web service for detecting retracted articles and AI-generated references. BibCheck cross-references citations with Crossref and DataCite using the problematic paper screener developed at IRIT.
- ABES (Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur)coreABES and Inist co-participate in events such as the annual Journées ABES, where Inist presents its services (Istex Search, Click & Read, etc.) to the French documentary community. Joint presence at the Corum de Montpellier for the 2026 edition.
- URFIST (Unité Réseau FIST)corePartnership with the national URFIST network to deliver structured training on ISTEX services, corpus building, and text mining. URFIST acts as an institutional relay for Inist training across French universities and research institutions.
- FooSIN / GO FAIR Food Systems Implementation NetworkminorInist participated in the FooSIN project (ANR-19-DATA-0019), the French contribution to GO FAIR, through which Inrae and Inist collaborated to evaluate FAIR compliance of Loterre and TermSciences using the SHARC evaluation framework from RDA.
- INRAE (Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement)minorINRAE partnered with Inist within the FooSIN project to test the SHARC FAIR evaluation grid on Inist's terminological platforms. INRAE subsequently collaborated with Inist to evaluate Loterre's FAIRitude.
- RENATERcoreRENATER operates the French research network and hosts the webinar registration and distribution infrastructure used by Inist (evento.renater.fr, webinaire.numerique.gouv.fr). Inist's ezMESURE/Readmetrics service integrates with RENATER infrastructure for usage data collection.
- GDR Mémoire (CNRS)minorInist is involved in the GDR Mémoire (CNRS interdisciplinary memory research network, created 2018) and provides terminological resources including the CogMemo thesaurus and thematic corpora (Mémoire-Neurosciences, Mémoire-SHS).
- Université Paris-Saclay / LSCE (Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement)minorInist partnered with Université Paris-Saclay and LSCE (CEA/CNRS/Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin) on the Paleosaurus project to create a standardized paleoclimatology vocabulary using ISTEX corpus extraction and TermSuite tools.
- COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories)minorInist's translation team produced the official French translation of the COAR Next Generation Repositories report (Behaviours and Technical Recommendations) in collaboration with Marlène Delhaye of Aix-Marseille University.
- RDA France (Research Data Alliance)minorInist participates in RDA and its French chapter, contributing to FAIR evaluation methodologies (SHARC grid), data management plan workshops, and open science standardization efforts.
- Revue de Primatologie / OpenEditionminorSince 2021, Inist's translation team has translated approximately 100,000 words for the Revue de Primatologie, and both parties co-developed a primatology thesaurus now published on Loterre, which in turn feeds back into machine translation tools.
Scale indicators7 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights6 records
Inist competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- HAL (Hyper Articles en Ligne): French multidisciplinary open archive managed by CCSD-CNRS for depositing and disseminating scholarly publications; Inist operates HAL-CNRS as a sub-product. Directly comparable as a French open-science scholarly infrastructure for the same ESR community.
- ABES (Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur): French national bibliographic agency for higher education, co-participating with Inist in the Journées ABES and operating parallel documentary infrastructure (theses.fr, Sudoc, STAR). Directly comparable as a French public-sector scientific information infrastructure operator serving the same ESR community.
- Europe PMC: European life-sciences literature database providing open access to PubMed-indexed abstracts and full-text articles. Directly comparable to ISTEX as a publicly-funded, open scientific literature infrastructure with TDM capabilities and broad institutional use.
- OpenEdition: French open-access publishing platform for humanities and social sciences. Inist's Loterre integrates with OpenEdition for the Revue de Primatologie and Inist provides translation support; comparable as a French open-science infrastructure provider in scholarly publishing and discoverability.
Broad incumbents
- Crossref: Global DOI registration agency and citation metadata infrastructure; Inist's bibCheck integrates directly with Crossref. Comparable as scholarly metadata infrastructure that anchors Inist's reference-validation and bibliometric services.
- DataCite: Global non-profit DOI registration agency for research data; Inist is a Consortium DataCite France member and bibCheck cross-references DataCite. Comparable as a research-data citation infrastructure serving the same open-science community.
- Clarivate (Web of Science): Commercial incumbent operating Web of Science, the dominant global scientific citation index. Inist's bibliometric services compete in the same research-evaluation and citation-analytics category, though Inist targets the French public sector while Clarivate is global/commercial.
Emerging players
- OpenAlex: Open替代 of Microsoft Academic Graph providing free scholarly metadata and citation data; Inist's Lodex launched a ready-to-use OpenAlex model in 2026. Comparable as an open scholarly information infrastructure targeting the same text-mining and bibliometrics use cases.
- DBLP: Computer science bibliography database providing open bibliographic metadata and citation data. Comparable as a discipline-focused open scholarly information infrastructure used in research and TDM workflows.
Others
Market position
Strengths4 records
Weaknesses4 records
Competitive moat7 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights6 records
Customer concentration
Inist social profiles
Digital presenceInist compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance3 records
Inist financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Inist leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles3 records
Inist funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds
Investors
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Inist M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Inist
What does Inist do?
Inist (Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique) is a CNRS research support unit (UAR 76) that operates a national scientific information infrastructure for the French higher education and research community. It provides free access to scientific literature through BibCNRS, the ISTEX corpus of 30M+ full-text documents, and the Click & Read browser extension linking 80+ partner institutions. Its portfolio includes text and data mining tools (TDM Factory, Istex TDM web services), multilingual scientific terminologies (Loterre), data management planning (OPIDoR), data visualization (Lodex), and usage measurement (Readmetrics/ezMESURE), all aligned with FAIR and open science principles.
Is Inist a public or private company?
Inist is a private company. It is classified as state government owned and is currently operating.
When was Inist founded?
Inist was founded in 1989. It employs 501 to 1,000 people.
Where is Inist based?
Inist is headquartered in Vandoeuvre-lès-nancy, France, in the Europe region.
How does Inist make money?
One revenue line is on record: public Research Funding (CNRS).
Who are Inist's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are HAL (Hyper Articles en Ligne), ABES (Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur), Europe PMC and OpenEdition. Broad incumbents are Crossref, DataCite and Clarivate (Web of Science). Emerging players are OpenAlex and DBLP. OCLC is listed as an others.
Does Inist have an API?
Yes. TDM web services using OpenAPI standard, available for the teaching and research community. Services include: vocabulary-controlled indexing, affiliation alignment via RNSR reference, term extraction from French or English texts, postal address structuring, automatic classification, geographic agglomeration detection in WOS affiliations, and affiliation text structuring. Loterre platform provides REST API and SPARQL endpoint for querying and downloading terminological resources (SKOS/RDF, csv, pdf, json-ld formats). Developer documentation is at services.istex.fr.
What industry is Inist in?
Inist's product category is Scientific Information Infrastructure. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HLAGAJAC, Scientific Data Management & Data Platforms (SDMS/Data Lakehouse for R&D), with a secondary code of EDAGAGAG, Scientific & Laboratory Reference (Chemistry, Biology, Physics; Methods & Protocols). Its NAICS code is 5416 and its SIC code is 8731.