Imagine reading and annotating a new research paper and discovering that you can see and respond to notes from experts all over the world. That vision, a network created by researchers for researchers to discuss research, gave rise to DropCite.
Scientists have long sought a fast, free, and open system for sharing research. The urgency for rapid, open dissemination in the face of the COVID pandemic turned that vision for the future into an absolute necessity. Making that a reality is the founders' driving force behind creating DropCite.
The Pandemic, Preprints and Peer Review
The pandemic demonstrated the power of immediate sharing of research results and energized the open science revolution. The speed of release of preprints during COVID was game changing, but each preprint is stamped with a warning: “Not certified by peer review”.
Peer review is a system that came into common use by scientific journals in the 1970’s to capture comments of a panel of experts on a given research paper as the gatekeeper to publishing. Journals added prolonged review time and paywalls to ostensibly add ‘heft’ to publication. This has become an anachronistic model, effectively stifling and skewing the dissemination of scientific research for over half a century. It took a worldwide pandemic to validate the drastic need for major change.
Modern science requires inline, anytime, anywhere annotation to capture the reaction of the scientific community to new and ongoing research. That needs to be parsed with AI/ML to generate rapid, crowd-sourced evaluation. Researchers need to be connected through an expert-driven community resource to allow research to be revised, improved and publicly shared in real time.
DropCite
This is exactly what DropCite platforms achieve. New models for sharing and collaborating on research.
researhXchangeTM – Creates forums for experts in a given field to review and discuss newly released preprints
researchXchange LIVETM – Webinars providing a forum for live discussion of emerging research
DC Conference - Connects authors of posters and presentations to their global audience for active discussion before, during and after a conference
The Future of Open Science
Open science has become mainstream. In August of 2022, the White House announced a plan to make rapid, open science the new normal.
"The global and interconnected emergencies beginning in 2020 were a window into the power of immediate public access to federally funded research, and the ways it can accelerate scientific discovery and translation of science into practice and policy." - Office of Science and Technology Policy
The stated goal of OSTP is to make all federally research openly available over the course of the next 3 years. To borrow a line from Wayne Gretzky, that is where the puck is going.