A new social network could facilitate the exchange of scientific ideas… and save literally billions of dollars in the process. A major problem facing the scientific community is the issue of transparency and availability for data and results. For example, Forbes recently profiled a Yale PhD candidate who desperately needed the original results of another lab’s similar experiment to complete the testing of his own hypothesis. However, it was difficult to access this information. For many lab scientists, this means the experiment in question must be replicated in order to get those results. The problem is that experiments can be expensive, and replicating some just to get data that’s already out there can add up to be a costly bill. By some estimates, as much as $27 billion is used on replicating experiments. An app called protocols.io seeks to change that. A social network for scientists, it serves as an open resource for these results to be readily available.
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