Abstract

In this event, we will present the initiative Crowdfight, created to match researchers who need expert help for their projects with other scientists that have the adequate skills. Crowdfight was born during the pandemic after identifying the need for diverting scientific resources to COVID research. With the initiative, we were able to enrol more than 40K scientists in the project and solve more than 100 requests for help in COVID-related research. Our experience allowed us to identify a main deficit in nowadays research: collaborations are often limited to those formally set through grants and internal contacts, and could be fostered well-beyond these limits.

In the first part of the symposium we will present our objectives and methodology. In the second part, we will describe real examples illustrating the potential of our approximation and the opportunities it offers. We will finish with a third section, in which we will evaluate the current situation of the project, and we will describe the challenges we are facing for a wider implementation of our approximation. We will show that a particularly relevant problem comes from the lack of credit that scientists nowadays receive for scientific activities beyond publishing articles, and in particular for those inputs that do not have a clearly quantifiable outcome. We will finally discuss how we have redesigned our workflow, and the next steps we will be taking to solve these challenges.