Opscidia
Opscidia is a French SaaS platform for scientific and technology intelligence. It searches aggregated research and patent databases, generates summaries, maps emerging trends and shares monitoring projects across R&D, innovation and competitive intelligence teams in companies and public institutions.
What is Opscidia?
Opscidia is a scientific and technology intelligence platform published by Opscidia SAS, a French company based at 9 rue des Colonnes in Paris and incubated at Telecom Paris. It is delivered as a web application, reached at app.opscidia.com, and it addresses one job: finding, reading, summarising and sharing what the research literature and the patent record say about a technical subject.
The product sits on top of thirteen aggregated public sources that Opscidia queries rather than owns, among them PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Patents, arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, Crossref, OpenAlex, USPTO, EPO, WIPO, theses.fr, ClinicalTrials.gov and CORDIS. Indexed content types include journal articles, patents, preprints, theses, clinical trials, research projects and retracted papers, across more than twenty disciplines, refreshed daily. Treat the advertised volume with care: the data sources page claims more than 250 million publications, while other pages of the same site quote 200 million and 180 million.
Six capabilities are presented on the home page: an AI search engine, a summary generator, scientific ecosystem analysis, trend measurement, alerts and RSS feeds, and team collaboration. Agent Search, the conversational layer, takes a word, a sentence or a question, explores the literature and groups results by theme with a summary for each group. Trends & Mappings turns publication flows into charts and semantic maps. Questions can also be put to full texts, which returns precise answers together with the passages they come from. A browser extension imports articles and PDFs found on the web straight into a project.
Alongside the software, Opscidia sells work: bespoke intelligence projects and a fully delegated analysis service. Documented examples include a semantic module for Veolia, an ontology generator for OpenAIRE, plant health monitoring for INRAE, a weak-signal detector for the European Commission, the Science Checker for the Viecth foundation and medical monitoring for EFS. Corporate logos displayed on the site include Danone, Veolia, Bio-Rad, Groupe Bel, Engie, GTT, L'Oreal, Roullier and EDF.
The team is presented as nine people, led by chief executive Sylvain Massip and chief technology officer Frejus Laleye. Access is sold by quote on a twelve-month subscription: there is no public price and no self-service sign-up.
What it does
- Search a corpus of scientific publications and patents with an AI engine, or in classic boolean syntax when precision matters more than ranking
- Ask a question in plain language and get contextualised answers extracted from full texts, with their sources attached
- Summarise several scientific articles into a single synthesis in one click, and draft a report with the writing assistant
- Chart technology trends and build semantic maps of the concepts in a research field
- Set targeted alerts and RSS feeds on the subjects you follow, and build custom dashboards on publication flows
- Centralise a watch in collaborative projects and playlists, with likes and comments instead of forwarded emails
- Capture articles and PDFs from your browser with the extension, import and export data, and connect a Zotero library
When to use Opscidia / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Opscidia is the right fit.
When to use Opscidia
- R&D engineers and innovation managers who need a defensible state of the art before launching, arbitrating or defunding a project
- Technology scouts and competitive intelligence analysts tracking emerging topics, new entrants and patent activity in a technical field
- Knowledge managers and information officers asked to centralise a monitoring effort that currently lives scattered across mailboxes and personal folders
- Pharmaceutical and life sciences teams combining literature review, clinical trial tracking and regulatory or clinical evaluation writing
- Public research bodies, universities and innovation consultancies that would rather buy a seat-based subscription, with training included, than build their own search stack
When not to use Opscidia
- Developers and data teams: no API and no technical documentation are published, so results cannot be piped into an in-house pipeline
- Buyers who want a public price and self-service checkout, since access goes through a sales quote and a twelve-month commitment renewed by tacit agreement
- Individuals and small teams hoping to sign up and test on their own, because every path on the site leads to a demo booking or a contact form
- Anyone monitoring non-scientific sources such as general press, market news or social media: the corpus is research literature and patents
- Mobile-first users, and teams whose working language is neither French nor English, as there is no iOS or Android application and the interface ships in two languages only
How to use Opscidia
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Start on the demo page and book a slot, announced as a thirty-minute session, or send the contact form instead
- Expect a reply within twenty-four hours, the delay the contact page commits to
- Scope your need with the sales team: there is no rate card, so a quotation is drawn up for your organisation
- Sign the quotation; the terms commit Opscidia to opening access within thirty days at the latest
- Appoint a Referrer inside your organisation, the single contact who receives all communications about the platform
- Distribute the seats you have bought between your end users, each of whom manages their own named credentials
- Take the training included in the subscription, delivered on site or remotely
- Log in to app.opscidia.com and run your first searches, with the AI engine or in boolean syntax
- Install the browser extension separately to capture articles and PDFs from the web into a project
- Set up alerts, RSS feeds and dashboards, then bring colleagues into shared projects, or hand the whole watch over to Opscidia's analysts as a service
Pros & Cons
Pros
- A named and verifiable corpus: thirteen public sources listed on a dedicated page, covering articles, patents, preprints, theses and clinical trials. That level of disclosure is uncommon in this category
- The whole chain in one place, from search to analysis, synthesis and sharing, instead of three products stitched together by hand
- Answers are presented as sourced and verifiable, extracted from full texts, which keeps the reader one click away from the original
- A French publisher under French law, with an explicit written GDPR commitment, a dedicated data protection mailbox and a named officer
- User training is included in the subscription, and support runs on three channels: email, contact form and in-platform messaging
- Credible references: large industrial accounts on the client wall and documented public projects with INRAE, OpenAIRE, the European Commission and EFS
- A scientific team of doctorate holders in physics, biology and natural language processing, and the option of delegating the watch entirely to them as a service
Cons
- No public pricing whatsoever: no pricing page, no rate card, no range anywhere on the site. The amount only exists inside a commercial quotation
- No API and no technical documentation, so nothing can be industrialised or fed into an in-house pipeline, and there is no mobile application either
- A twelve-month commitment renewed by tacit agreement, with notice due at the latest one month before term, and an annual price revision indexed on Syntec at the publisher's initiative
- The only privacy policy published covers the browser extension. Nothing equivalent is published for the platform, which is where customer documents actually go
- No data processing agreement, no sub-processor list, no security certification on display, and no stated hosting country for customer data
- No free self-service trial: the terms mention a discovery period left entirely to the publisher's discretion, the terms themselves can be changed at any time, without prior notice, and the warranty disclaimer is very broad
- A poorly maintained website: a copyright frozen at 2022, an English footer pointing at French URLs, two different company registries named across two legal documents, and corpus volumes swinging between 180 and 250 million depending on the page
Pricing & Plans
No price is public. Opscidia publishes no pricing page and no rate card; the only pricing rule stated in the terms is that the customer agrees to pay the price specified in the quotation, with prices expressed in euros excluding tax. The commercial model is a twelve-month subscription, invoiced annually or monthly, settled by SEPA direct debit or bank card within thirty days, renewed by tacit agreement for further twelve-month periods and open to an annual revision indexed on the Syntec index with two months' notice. Training and additional services are quoted separately. No permanent free plan is announced, and no self-service free trial exists: the terms allow a free discovery period granted at the publisher's sole discretion, which is a possibility and not a commitment. A lowest entry price therefore cannot be stated, because it is set case by case in a commercial quotation.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Opscidia handles your data.
GDPR overview
Compliance is claimed explicitly and in writing. The terms state that OPSCIDIA undertakes to strictly apply the regulations on the protection of personal data, naming both French Law 78-17 of 6 January 1978 as amended and Regulation (EU) 2016/679. A dedicated mailbox, rgpd@opscidia.com, is published for data protection requests, and a data protection officer is named in the legal notice. Access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and portability are all listed, with an explicit referral to the French supervisory authority, the CNIL. Cookies are capped at twelve months and a consent banner is in place. No Article 27 representative is required, the company being established in the European Union. What is missing is the operational layer: no data processing agreement is published or announced on request, no sub-processor list, and no security certification such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2.
Who owns the data?
Opscidia SAS is named as the data controller, but only inside the privacy policy that covers the browser extension. The terms state that Opscidia holds the intellectual property rights over the platform and over the Information it serves, and that login credentials are personal and non-transferable. Documents you import are stored on Opscidia's side and attached to the project you choose, while the terms warn that importing non-anonymised or confidential documents onto the platform is at the Customer's sole risk. What no published document ever states is who owns the content a customer uploads, who inside Opscidia may access it, and on what terms it is returned or destroyed. Ask for those three answers in writing before uploading anything sensitive.
Reuse rights
Reuse by the customer is framed rather than freely granted. Opscidia keeps the intellectual property rights over the platform and over the Information it serves, access is sold per named user with non-transferable credentials, and the terms expressly rule out any text and data mining on the results. In practice you can search, summarise, export, annotate and share findings inside your own projects and with your own colleagues; no blanket permission to redistribute the served content outside the subscribing organisation is written anywhere. On the publisher's side, the only privacy document available covers the browser extension, and there the commitment is explicit: data is used exclusively to provide its core functionality, meaning authentication and import, never for advertising or profiling, and it is neither sold, rented nor transferred to third parties. The extension reads the active tab passively and sends nothing until you click Import; the full page is transmitted only when citation metadata is insufficient. No health, financial, location or keystroke data is collected. The terms add that IP addresses and connection data are retained as proof and for access control. For the platform itself, no equivalent commitment is published.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting location is announced for customer data. The legal notice names Amazon Web Services, Inc. as the host of the website and prints that company's corporate address in Seattle, which identifies the provider and says nothing about where anything is stored. The browser extension's privacy policy states that imported PDFs go to Opscidia's secure storage through Scaleway S3, again without naming a country or a region. An independent network check shows the public site resolving to a French provider's infrastructure in Paris, but that describes the marketing site, not the application, which lives on a separate subdomain, app.opscidia.com. What can be asserted is jurisdictional rather than physical: the publisher is established in France, declares itself subject to French law and to the GDPR, and designates the Paris courts. Everything else, from country and region to replication and sub-processors, is unpublished. If hosting location matters to your compliance team, it has to be obtained in writing before signature, because nothing on the site answers it.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Opscidia.
- The only privacy policy published covers the browser extension, not the platform. Whatever you import into app.opscidia.com is governed by a document that does not exist in public, and that gap is the first thing to raise before uploading anything sensitive
- That same privacy page still carries an unerased drafting instruction, in French, at the very top: the document went online without a final read. Treat its guarantees as a draft until they are restated in your contract
- The terms warn that importing non-anonymised or confidential documents is at the customer's sole risk, while no retention period, no sub-processor list and no processing agreement is published, and the declared website host in the legal notice does not match the provider the domain actually resolves to. Trade secrecy and compliance are left to your own diligence
- The site contradicts itself about its own identity: the legal notice and the terms name two different commercial court registries, Bobigny in one and Paris in the other; the company identifier printed in the footer no longer matches the current registered office; an old Saint-Ouen address survives on the publishing branch's terms; the About page names one founder where earlier versions of the site presented two; and the data protection officer's name is spelled two different ways
- Advertised corpus size varies from page to page, between 180, 200 and 250 million documents, and the home page announces eight features while listing six. Never quote these figures in a deliverable without checking them inside the product
- The corpus belongs to third parties such as PubMed, arXiv, EPO and USPTO. Coverage, freshness and blind spots are theirs, not Opscidia's, a missing paper is not necessarily a defect of the tool, and the terms disclaim any express or implied warranty on the information served
- Delegating the watch, or trusting a generated summary without opening the source, quietly erodes the very skill the tool is meant to support. Sourced answers are an invitation to verify, not a licence to stop reading, and a tacitly renewed twelve-month subscription makes it easy to keep paying for a habit nobody practises any more
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Technically easy, commercially slow. Nothing to install: the platform runs in a browser at app.opscidia.com, Opscidia opens the access, and you then distribute seats among your users, each managing their own named credentials. One customer contact, the Referrer, centralises communication, and training is included, on site or remote. Only the browser extension needs a separate install. There is no single sign-on, no API and no documented connector, so there is no integration work to do either. The real delay is commercial: no self-service sign-up, and access is contractually due within thirty days of the signed quotation.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Opscidia
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Opscidia.
Frequently asked questions
What does Opscidia actually search?
What types of content are indexed?
Which languages does Opscidia handle?
How much does Opscidia cost?
Is there a free trial, and how can I test the tool?
Does Opscidia offer an API?
Is there a mobile app?
What is Agent Search?
Is GDPR properly covered?
Where is the data hosted?
Should you pick Opscidia?
Opscidia is a narrow tool that does its job seriously: scientific and patent intelligence for organisations, end to end. Its strongest asset is transparency about the corpus, with thirteen public databases named on a dedicated page and content types spelled out down to retracted papers, combined with a chain that runs from search to synthesis to shared projects without leaving the platform. Large industrial references and documented public projects with INRAE, OpenAIRE, the European Commission and EFS suggest a product that has survived real deployments, and the option of handing the watch over to Opscidia's own analysts is a genuine differentiator for teams short on time.
The reservations are commercial and documentary rather than technical. Nothing about the price is public: access runs through a sales quotation, on a twelve-month subscription renewed by tacit agreement, with an annual revision the publisher can trigger. There is no API, which closes the door on industrialising the output. And the paperwork is thinner than the sales pages suggest: the only privacy policy published covers the browser extension, not the platform where your documents actually live, and there is no data processing agreement, no sub-processor list, no certification and no stated hosting country. The site itself is poorly maintained, with a copyright frozen at 2022 and figures that change from one page to the next, which does not inspire confidence in the rigour of the rest.
Worth evaluating in a demo if you run R&D, innovation or competitive intelligence work on scientific and patent literature, and if a twelve-month commitment is acceptable. Go in with a written list of demands: the price and its revision terms, the scope of the data protection commitment for the platform, where customer data is hosted, and a processing agreement. Judge the answers, not the brochure.
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