Science Official becomes a community for researchers, built around what they told us they need
Every scientist with an ORCID iD, every research institution and every research funder now has a page on Science Official. Researchers can claim their card, write for the public, and discuss papers and articles with each other. We built it from a list of needs that researchers themselves keep naming.
Before we built anything, we read. Surveys of thousands of scientists from the last three years, forums where PhD students and postdocs talk to each other, and the long list of complaints about the platforms researchers already use. The same needs came up again and again: finding money for research takes days, profiles mix people up with their namesakes, platforms send pressure emails, reviewing is invisible work, and good research rarely reaches the public with its authors named.
Today we are opening a community on Science Official that answers those needs one by one. The full list, with what is ready and what we are still building, is on a single page: What researchers need.
A card for every scientist
The scientists catalogue lists researchers who have an ORCID iD and at least three works in the last five years. Each card shows their research topics, citations per year, their career across institutions, recent works and the grants they led. We tie every card to an ORCID iD, not to a name, so namesakes are not merged.
If there is a card about you, press This is me, confirm with a code sent to your work email, and the card is yours: add a photo and a short bio, link your papers, answer questions. If something on a card is wrong, or you want it removed, you can tell us in one step without an account. We never show email addresses and we never send "you were mentioned" emails.
Institutions, funders and fields
Institutions covers universities, institutes, hospitals and labs from the Research Organization Registry, with their strongest topics, most cited scientists and the grants they received. Funders lists the organisations that give research grants, with who they funded, how much, and on which topics: information that until now sat mostly behind institutional subscriptions. Fields and rankings show who leads each area of research; places in our rankings cannot be bought, and the method explains every number.
All countries are treated the same way.
Writing and discussion
The community feed brings together papers shared on Science Official Papers, popular-science pieces and short notes written by researchers, and the latest from this journal, in order of time, with no algorithm and no ads. Anyone with an account can write. Under every paper, every post and every journal article there is a discussion.
What comes next
We are working on a single list of open grant calls with deadlines and reminders, on DOIs for reviews, on lab pages where students can find a place to start, and on linking every article in this journal to the scientists behind the research. Each of them is on the list, and we will mark them as live when they are.
Science Official is a non-commercial community. If a need is missing from our list, tell us.