IASCPolls: The Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus Polling Platform

Humanity needs a way to pool scientific community opinion quickly and efficiently on a given statement of interest. This should be on a very large scale, such that one can have confidence that the result reflects international scientific opinion. For this pilot project (2022-23), we developed tailored architecture in the form of a novel polling platform, to survey a network of scientists at 30 academic institutions around the world. Personal, one-to-one emails were sent to all relevant scientists at those institutions, asking them for their position on our pilot statement, "Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus." Scientists answered by clicking a URL embedded in the email, and confirming their response on a 5-point Likert scale. Voting was anonymous, with the token linking the scientist to their vote being destroyed upon voting, and their response logged against the demographics of scientific field of expertise (broadly construed) and institution for subsequent data analysis.