Open Discovery is a platform that enables a more open, collaborative, internet-native model of scientific research. We don’t just enable it — we create incentives for it. Our business model is partnering with science funders to incentivize adoption of scientific workflows that accelerate scientific progress. Our initial research focus is Long Covid, ME/CFS, and related chronic illnesses.
Long Covid & ME/CFS are often devastating illnesses. The physical illness is compounded by the fact that many in the medical community consider them psychosomatic disorders. This results in psychological suffering for patients, treatment suggestions that often make the physical condition worse, and a lack of research funds for anything that would actually help.
The sheer scale of the COVID-19 pandemic has driven renewed attention on virus-induced chronic illness. Many researchers themselves have been personally affected. With highly motviated researchers, now is the time to break free of an outdated publish-or-perish system and start working together to do things a better way.
We believe a more open and collaborative model of scientific research can accelerate progress by an order of magnitude. There are just so many ways in which the current academic reward system produces behavior that is not aligned with the best interests of science and society. Read how we accelerate scientific progress.
Open Discovery was initially conceived of by Jesse Spaulding in 2014. The first version (named Thinklab) gained it’s first power user when Jesse met Daniel Himmelstein at an open science event in San Francisco. Daniel shared Jesse’s vision and would go on to lead the first project on the platform: Repurposing drugs on a heterogeneous network.
While Thinklab didn’t take off at the time, Jesse always had dreams of returning to the project. In the proceeding years Jesse had great success with algorithmic cryptocurrency trading — followed by a timely investment going all in on Tesla. With newly aquired resources, and personal experiences with Long Covid that highlighted the inadequacies of the status quo in academic research, the time was right to return to the project. The passion to prove a superior model of research was reignited!
Open Discovery
Massively collaborative open science