SCINDR - The SCience INtroDuction Robot that will Connect Open Scientists

This project will develop a way to connect, in real time, globally disparate researchers who are doing similar science so that they can work better and faster towards the development of new medicines. The scientific literature already fulfills the role of notifying researchers about work that has been done, and social media has recently evolved to alert researchers to what is being done. While these new communication technologies simplify the collaborative process between widely distributed researchers, there still exists a major gap in efficient real time alerting and updating. We aim to automate an alert process so that, as a researcher records what they are doing in a natural way, they are immediately alerted to others around the world in real time who are working on related science. Our system is built on the conceptual model of the machine understanding of human-generated content, used by social media platforms to generate alerts to further relevant content. The system we propose to build will understand the molecular information being recorded in a scientist's notebook. It will then search both its own records and others in the public domain in order to introduce scientists where there may be mutual advantage - when two laboratories are working on similar molecules, assays or approaches, for example. To achieve this, we will build on a recently developed open source electronic lab notebook (ELN) to create the required component - the automated alerting service we call the SCience INtroDuction Robot, or SCINDR. We foresee wide application of SCINDR in chemical and biological research because it will accelerate research by connecting people. In so doing, SCINDR will provide the incentive for others to take their research into the public domain (Fig. 1).