Academics & PhD students

Ask your AI about a 2023 interview and get the actual quote.

Scattered research tools (Zotero, Obsidian, Notion, OneDrive, Dropbox, Moleskines) pulled into one centralised AI-queryable academic archive

Five years of interview transcripts, field notes, lit review, supervisor feedback and margin scribbles — scattered across Zotero, Notion, Obsidian, OneDrive, a Dropbox folder called "FINAL" and three moleskines. BrainCopy pulls them into one chronological, people-aware, fully-searchable archive that your AI assistant can query directly.

The problem

You ran twenty interviews in 2022, took forty pages of field notes in 2023, read three hundred papers across the whole thing, and wrote your thesis chapter in 2025. Your quotes are in one place, your notes in another, the PDFs in Zotero, and the synthesis is in your head — which is the only place you can't search.

Every time your supervisor says "didn't that participant say something like this?" you spend two hours finding the exact passage. Or you don't find it, and you reconstruct it, and you worry slightly that you're mis-quoting someone from an interview you did three years ago.

You tried Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Scrivener, NVivo. They each solve one layer. None of them handles "everything I wrote, heard, and read for five years" as one queryable space — and none of them plugs into Claude or ChatGPT so your AI can actually use your research as context.

How BrainCopy solves it

Import everything, not just the canonical sources

Upload Zotero libraries, Obsidian vaults, Notion exports, scanned paper notebooks, interview audio, Word docs, OneDrive folders. BrainCopy handles each format natively — OCRs handwriting, transcribes audio, preserves Zotero metadata.

Everything gets a date and a person

Interview from 2022 → attached to the participant (anonymised as you wish). Field notes → filed chronologically. Lit review notes → linked to the paper's citation. A five-year research trajectory becomes navigable by date, person, paper, or theme.

Voice capture in the field

Walking home from an interview, record a two-minute reflection. BrainCopy transcribes, files it under the interview, and links it to the participant. Your "how did that really go?" moment is captured while it's fresh, not reconstructed six months later when you sit down to code.

Your AI gets real context via MCP

BrainCopy exposes your research archive to Claude or ChatGPT through MCP (Model Context Protocol). "Which participants talked about work-from-home fatigue?" becomes one query. The AI pulls actual quotes with citations, not hallucinations. Your thesis-writing LLM finally has the primary data in front of it.

GDPR-safe, EU-hosted, under your control

Participant data is legally loaded. BrainCopy runs on European infrastructure (Germany, Sweden), you hold the encryption, and participant anonymisation is enforced in how data leaves the archive. Your ethics committee will recognise this.

What you'll actually see

Beta price for Academics & PhD students

50% off the €10/month subscription, forever, for PhD students and academics. Your discount never expires. For students on a stipend.

ACADEMICS50

Start with ACADEMICS50 See full pricing

FAQ

What about participant confidentiality?
You control access per-tag. Participant data can be scoped to you alone, never exported to your AI if you don't want it to be, and the anonymisation you apply in BrainCopy flows through every view and every AI query. No participant PII goes to third parties without your explicit action.
Is this GDPR-compliant?
Yes. EU-hosted (Hetzner, Germany; Cnvert Sweden AB), full data export and deletion, participant-level access controls. BrainCopy as an organisation is GDPR-compliant by structure.
How does the AI integration actually work?
BrainCopy runs an MCP server endpoint for your account. You add it to Claude Desktop or Claude Code once — it shows up as a tool. Your AI can then search your diary, participants, notes, tasks, and get results back. No API keys to juggle, no copy-paste between windows.
What about NVivo / Atlas.ti / MAXQDA?
Those are coding tools — they're for structured qualitative analysis. BrainCopy is the layer underneath: the chronological, searchable, AI-queryable archive. Export from BrainCopy into your coding tool, keep the coding tool for formal analysis, use BrainCopy for "where did I put that thing."
Will you still exist when I submit in 2028?
Your files live in a Nextcloud account on EU infrastructure that you control independently of BrainCopy. If we disappeared, you'd keep every file. We can't hold your thesis hostage.
Cost?
Subscription €10/month (€5/month forever with ACADEMICS50). One-time AI processing for a multi-year archive is typically €30–€150 depending on size. This is meant to be affordable on a PhD stipend.
Can I use it for collaborative projects?
Multi-user projects are on the roadmap. Today it's single-user, with the possibility of designating a supervisor or co-author as a legacy access recipient with their own lens on the archive.

Ready to try it?

Takes about 30 seconds to sign up. You can start importing immediately.

Start your academic trial

Who else uses BrainCopy

Different people, same problem: too many memories scattered across too many places.