Sci2sci - “scientist-to-scientist” - is a project that builds infrastructure for decentralized data sharing between researchers.

While the Internet has allowed an easy peer-to-peer information exchange adopted by multiple industries and users worldwide, the science ecosystem is largely acting as if the last 30 years of telecommunication has never taken place. Academic knowledge nowadays is still siloed in pdf-formatted journals and hidden behind the paywalls. Moreover, original datasets are often left unpublished due to the lack of incentives to release raw data into public repositories. Preparing data for publication takes hours of effort and does not pay off, and finding the relevant data online is also hard due to poor annotation and inefficient search software.

We at sci2sci are building the following modules to update science:

• Search engine for structured data (it’s like Google, but for .csv files, Excel spreadsheets etc.) to make use of the data that has already been published but spread all over the Internet. This module is almost finished (short demo here) and we are looking for beta testers, please subscribe!
• Publishing platform for research data - to release high-quality, well-annotated data to the world.
• Electronic lab notebook (for easy research data management and collaboration) seamlessly integrated with our publishing platform, to further streamline data sharing and publish “on-the-go” - in just one click.
• Social network layer, where open discussions and research review will be fostered.
• Data verification layer that scores the dataset quality, uniqueness etc.
• Tokenization system that allows to reward researchers’ contributions to the system with reputation and tokens.
• Knowledge synthesis layer - cherry on the top and our ultimate goal. We are planning to utilize growing AI capabilities for extraction of non-obvious patterns from the large corpora of scientific data. We aim at creating software that will make principles of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data a default in scientists’ daily routine. Our mission is to make research data AI-friendly and openly available for reuse and collaboration by academic researchers, the industry and the public.

Our recent pitch video can be found here.

Our larger vision and inspiration is described in this article.

Core team: Angelina Lesnikova, PhD in Neuroscience; Valerii Kremnev, Engineering manager.

All funds we’re currently raising will be used for the sci2sci platform development.

We are incredibly thankful to almost 200 people who have supported us on Gitcoin so far! We are proud to share our progress with you on Github and social networks, and very happy to provide you with privileged early access to the platform.

Here you can see our search explainer video: