Concepts & Methods

Field Building Institutional Design Governance Citizen & Participatory Science Funding Mechanisms AI Tools for Science Technology Roadmaps Vision Papers Research Methods Research Data Infrastructure Research Evaluation Scientometrics & Research Analytics Knowledge Synthesis Science Communication Output & Publishing Intellectual Property

Field Building

Institutional Design

  • Playbook: Designing new institutions and renewing existing ones by TIAL. March 25, 2025.
  • Mariana Mazzucato — Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. Argues that governments should define ambitious societal missions and use procurement, public investment, and co-creation to drive solutions — applied directly to science and innovation institutions. Allen Lane, 2021.
  • Mariana Mazzucato — The Entrepreneurial State. Empirical case that the state, not the private sector, has been the primary investor in radical, high-risk technologies; the intellectual foundation for mission-oriented public research institutions. Anthem Press, 2013.
  • Elinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons. Nobel-winning analysis of how communities successfully manage shared resources through self-organisation and institutional design; introduces eight design principles for robust common-pool resource institutions directly applicable to open science commons. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  • Geoff Mulgan — Another World Is Possible. Broad argument for why institutional imagination — envisioning and building genuinely new institutions rather than reforming existing ones — is the central challenge for addressing complex societal problems. Chelsea Green, 2022.

Governance

  • Renaissance Philanthropy — Policy Entrepreneurship. Playbook on identifying policy levers, building coalitions, and leveraging strategic timing to influence government decision-making.
  • Foundation ownership and sustainability by David Schröder and Steen Thomsen. February 11, 2025.
  • INGSA (International Network for Government Science Advice) — Global network connecting science advisors, policymakers, and researchers; produces frameworks and case studies on how scientific evidence enters government decisions. Secretariat at University of Auckland.
  • Scholars at Risk — International network of universities protecting threatened scholars and promoting academic freedom; tracks attacks on higher education through the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project.
  • Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure — POSI. Nine principles (governance, membership, sustainability) for ensuring scholarly infrastructure remains community-owned and mission-driven rather than captured by commercial interests. 2015; stewarded by Invest in Open Infrastructure.

Citizen & Participatory Science

  • Zooniverse — World's largest people-powered research platform; 500+ projects across astronomy, biology, climate, history, and the humanities; 3M+ volunteers; 600+ resulting publications since 2009.
  • SciStarter — Directory of 3,700+ citizen science projects and events; participation tracker; built with support from the National Academies of Science.
  • iNaturalist — Biodiversity observation platform; 200M+ observations from 6M+ naturalists; data used in real ecological research and species distribution modelling.
  • eBird (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) — Global bird observation database; 1B+ records from 600,000+ contributors; canonical example of citizen science producing publishable scientific data at scale.
  • Open Humans — Platform for individuals to share personal health and biological data for research; connects participants directly with research projects.
  • European Citizen Science Association — Ten Principles of Citizen Science. The foundational governance framework for ethical citizen science design: covering scientific quality, data openness, participant benefit, public communication, and legal/IP considerations. 2015.
  • Muki Haklay — Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information. Introduces the most-used typology of participation levels — from crowdsourcing (data contribution) to extreme citizen science (co-investigation) — used to design participation frameworks. 2013.
  • Experiment.com — Crowdfunding platform purpose-built for scientific research; all-or-nothing model; 1,400+ funded projects, $12M+ pledged since 2012. Also runs topical grant programs.

Funding Mechanisms

Research Funding

  • Institute for Progress & Market Shaping Accelerator — The Atlas of Innovation. Interactive toolkit of frontier R&D funding mechanisms for philanthropists and policymakers. Led by Caleb Watney & Matthew Esche. 2026.
  • Renaissance Philanthropy — Thesis-Driven Philanthropic Funds. Playbook on deploying capital through expert fund directors who manage grant portfolios aligned around a specific thesis.
  • Renaissance Philanthropy — Catalytic Capital. Playbook on deploying investment tools — concessional debt, guarantees, equity — to fill financing gaps and mobilise larger flows of public and private capital beyond what grant-making alone can achieve.
  • Steve Olson — Experimental Approaches to Improving Research Funding Programs. March 7, 2024.

Quadratic Funding

Fund People, Not Projects

Fund Organizations, Not Projects

Advance Market Commitment & Market Shaping

Prizes

Coordinated Research Programs

Intramural Science

Commitments

  • Renaissance Philanthropy — Commitments. Playbook on using structured stakeholder pledges to drive collective action on major challenges without legislation or market incentives.

AI Tools for Science

  • Renaissance Philanthropy — Common Task Method. Playbook on uniting research communities around standardised datasets and clear metrics to accelerate AI applications in chemistry, materials science, climate, and beyond.
  • Elicit — AI research assistant for literature review, data extraction, and synthesis.
  • Consensus — AI-powered search engine for scientific papers.
  • Semantic Scholar — Free AI-powered research tool built by the Allen Institute for AI.
  • Connected Papers — Visual tool for finding and exploring papers relevant to your field.
  • ResearchRabbit — Paper discovery and literature mapping.
  • Scite — Smart citation analysis showing how papers have been cited in context.
  • Litmaps — Interactive literature maps for tracking research fields over time.
  • OpenAlex — Fully open catalog of the global research system: papers, authors, institutions, topics.
  • PaperQA by FutureHouse — Open-source LLM pipeline for question-answering over scientific literature.
  • Claude as a chemist — Anthropic's work on training Claude to interpret NMR spectra, match specialised software on peak prediction, and deduce molecular structures from experimental data alone.
  • Evidentia — Verifies scientific claims against 200M papers, 20M patents, 4M PhD theses, and 500K clinical trials; surfaces relevant unpublished data by connecting researchers with field experts. By Alvin Djajadikerta (Evidentia Labs; ex-Cambridge neuroscientist).
  • Otto-sr — AI agent for building systematic reviews; automates literature search, screening, and synthesis.
  • Ai2 ScholarQA — Allen Institute for AI's scholarly question-answering system, grounded in citations across millions of papers. 2024.
  • OpenEval — Extracts atomic claims from papers with LLM evaluation; 1.96M claims from 16,000+ papers, 81% agreement with human review. 2026.
  • Evidence.guide — API extracting hypotheses and test statistics from behavioural science papers. By Paul Litvak (Robyn Dawes Institute).
  • OpenAI — PaperBench. Benchmark for evaluating AI agents on replicating machine learning research from scratch. 2025.
  • Google DeepMind — AlphaFold 3. Predicts the structure and interactions of all molecules of life — proteins, DNA, RNA, small molecules, ions — from sequence; considered the clearest existing demonstration of AI solving a hard scientific problem that had resisted decades of human effort. 2024.

Technology Roadmaps, Tech Trees & Agenda Setting

Vision Papers

See Michael Nielsen's Working notes on the role of vision papers in basic science. May 28, 2022.

Research Methods

Preregistration

  • Brian A. Nosek et al. — The Preregistration Revolution. The canonical argument for preregistration — committing hypotheses and analysis plan to a time-stamped registry before data collection — as the key mechanism for separating confirmatory from exploratory science. PNAS, 2018.
  • OSF Registries — Open Science Framework registry for preregistrations across disciplines; the largest repository of study preregistrations.
  • AsPredicted — Lightweight nine-question preregistration tool designed for quick, minimal-friction commitment of study hypotheses and analysis plans.
  • ClinicalTrials.gov — Mandatory registry for clinical trials; the original and largest preregistration database; 500,000+ studies registered.

Registered Reports

  • Chris Chambers — What's next for Registered Reports?. Overview of the two-stage peer review format where methodology is reviewed and provisionally accepted before data collection; results published regardless of outcome. Nature Human Behaviour, 2019.
  • Center for Open Science — Registered Reports. Tracks which journals accept Registered Reports; 300+ journals now participate across psychology, medicine, ecology, and other fields.

Adversarial Collaboration

Open Data & FAIR Principles

  • Mark D. Wilkinson et al. — The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Established the four criteria — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — that have become the global standard for open research data practice. Scientific Data, 2016.
  • Open Science Framework (OSF) — Free platform by the Center for Open Science for preregistering studies, hosting data and materials, and collaborating across the research lifecycle.
  • Zenodo — CERN-hosted open repository for research data, software, publications, and materials; DOI assignment for any upload.

Replication

  • Open Science Collaboration — Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science. Landmark 2015 attempt to replicate 100 published psychology studies; approximately 36–39% reproduced at the original effect size. The study that brought the replication crisis into mainstream science. Science, 2015.
  • Colin Camerer et al. — Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science. Replication of 21 high-profile social science studies; 13 (62%) replicated with significantly lower effect sizes. Science, 2016.
  • Psychological Science Accelerator — Globally distributed network of 1,500+ labs across 80+ countries running large-scale, cross-cultural replications and new studies.
  • Many Labs — Series of large-scale replications testing whether effects hold across samples, sites, and contexts; produced the strongest evidence on which psychological findings generalise.

Research Data Infrastructure

Data Repositories

  • Zenodo — CERN-hosted open repository for data, software, publications, and materials; DOI assignment; 50 GB per deposit limit; guaranteed 20-year data conservation. Created for OpenAIRE.
  • Figshare — Widely used academic data repository; up to 10 TB per deposit; supports private sharing and embargo; free for open data. By Digital Science.
  • Dryad — Nonprofit, curated data repository strong in biology and ecology; full curation of all deposits; publishes exclusively under CC0; up to 300 GB per deposit.
  • Harvard Dataverse — Institutional repository widely used in social sciences; DOI assignment; open source software (Dataverse Project) deployable at institutions.

Persistent Identifiers & Infrastructure

  • ORCID — Open Researcher and Contributor ID; free persistent identifier for researchers; resolves the author disambiguation problem; integrated into most major publishers and funders. 20M+ registered researchers.
  • DataCite — International DOI registration agency for research data and software; assigns persistent identifiers to datasets; backbone of the research data citation ecosystem.
  • re3data.org — Registry of Research Data Repositories; directory of 3,000+ repositories by subject, content type, access, and country. By Helmholtz Association.
  • ROR (Research Organization Registry) — Open registry of research institution IDs; resolves the institutional affiliation disambiguation problem; maintained by community governance. 100,000+ organisations.

Data Management

  • DMPTool — Free tool for creating funder-compliant Data Management Plans; templates for NSF, NIH, Wellcome, and other major funders; maintained by the California Digital Library.
  • Goodman et al. — Ten Simple Rules for the Care and Feeding of Scientific Data. Practical guide to data management for scientists; covers naming, documentation, archiving, and licensing. PLOS Computational Biology, 2014.

Research Evaluation

  • DORA — San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. Landmark declaration recommending against use of journal-based metrics such as the Impact Factor in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. 2012; 26,000+ signatories across 171 countries as of 2025.
  • DORA — Coordinated Reform in Research Assessment and Publishing. On aligning reforms across evaluation and publishing systems. March 2026.
  • CoARA & DORA — Shared Principles, Shared Progress. Joint statement on global responsible research assessment culture, following the EU Presidency High-Level Conference in Copenhagen. December 2025.
  • Ola Thomson, Gemma Derrick et al. — Improving How Non-Traditionally Submitted Research Outputs Are Evaluated in the REF. University of Bristol Policy Briefing. May 2026.
  • DARPA — SCORE (Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence). Program pairing human coding of psychology papers with prediction market forecasts to assess replication likelihood; foundational infrastructure for scalable replication.
  • Retraction Watch — Tracks retracted papers across all journals; integrated with Crossref since October 2023. Run by the Center for Scientific Integrity.
  • Statcheck — Automatically detects statistical inconsistencies in psychology papers by recalculating reported test statistics from degrees of freedom and p-values.
  • Regcheck — Compares preregistered analysis plans against published results to flag deviations; automated preregistration auditing.
  • DORA — Reformscape. Interactive tool for exploring how institutions have implemented responsible research assessment for hiring, promotion, and tenure; searchable by country, institution type, and reform area.

Scientometrics & Research Analytics

Foundational Texts

  • Santo Fortunato et al. — Science of science. Comprehensive review of computational approaches to studying science — citation dynamics, team formation, career trajectories, knowledge diffusion, and the predictability of scientific impact. 14 co-authors including Barabási, Börner, Uzzi, and Wang. Science, 2018.
  • Dashun Wang & Albert-László Barabási — The Science of Science. Book-length treatment of the computational science-of-science programme; covers quantitative laws of scientific impact, team science, knowledge diffusion, and career patterns. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
  • Diana Hicks et al. — The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. Ten principles for responsible use of bibliometrics in research evaluation; counters metric misuse while establishing when quantitative indicators are appropriate. Nature, 2015.
  • Paul Smaldino & Richard McElreath — The natural selection of bad science. Evolutionary argument for why poor methods proliferate: selection pressures in academia reward productivity over rigor, making the spread of low-quality research a predictable structural outcome rather than individual failure. Royal Society Open Science, 2016.

Mapping & Visualization Tools

  • VOSviewer — The most widely used science mapping tool; visualizes co-authorship, citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation networks from Web of Science, Scopus, OpenAlex, Dimensions, Semantic Scholar, and other sources. Free; by Leiden University.
  • Bibliometrix / Biblioshiny — R package (and web-based Biblioshiny interface) for comprehensive bibliometric analysis; co-citation, keyword co-occurrence, thematic evolution, and collaboration networks. Free.
  • Publish or Perish — Desktop tool that queries Google Scholar, Crossref, OpenAlex, and others to retrieve citation metrics (h-index, g-index, citation counts) for authors, journals, and search terms. Free; by Anne-Wil Harzing.

Data & Citation Infrastructure

  • OpenCitations — Open citation index (COCI); 2B+ citation links extracted from Crossref; fully open and free; API access; the open alternative to Web of Science and Scopus citation data.
  • Dimensions — Comprehensive research database linking grants, publications, citations, clinical trials, patents, and policy documents; 100M+ publications; integrates Altmetric attention scores. By Digital Science.
  • pySciSci — Python library for reproducible science-of-science research at scale; provides standardized access to the Microsoft Academic Graph, Web of Science, and APS datasets with built-in citation network analysis. By Barabási lab.
  • Altmetric — Tracks mentions of research outputs across social media, news, policy documents, and blogs; assigns an Altmetric Attention Score; Bookmarklet tool available free. By Digital Science.

Knowledge Synthesis

Methods & Standards

Screening & Review Tools

  • Covidence — The primary screening and data extraction tool for Cochrane authors; streamlines title/abstract and full-text screening, data extraction, and risk-of-bias assessment. Subscription; free for Cochrane authors.
  • EPPI-Reviewer — Web-based systematic review tool from the UCL EPPI-Centre; the recommended platform for living reviews with many collaborators; supports text mining and AI-assisted screening.
  • Rayyan — AI-assisted title and abstract screening tool; blind mode for independent reviewer screening; one of the most widely adopted free screening tools. 400,000+ researchers.
  • RevMan Web — Cochrane's meta-analysis software; integrates with the Cochrane review process; the standard tool for forest plots and fixed/random-effects meta-analysis.
  • Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. The definitive methodological reference for conducting systematic reviews; covers search strategy, screening, data extraction, synthesis, and reporting. Freely available online.

Evidence Mapping

  • 3ie Evidence Gap Maps — Visual display of all evidence on a broad development question; identifies where evidence exists, what it shows, and where the most critical gaps are; used by international donors and policymakers.
  • Campbell Collaboration — Produces systematic reviews on the effectiveness of social interventions in crime, education, international development, and social welfare; the social-science counterpart to Cochrane.

Science Communication

Platforms & Outlets

  • The Conversation — Academic articles rewritten for general audiences by academics with editorial support from journalists; Creative Commons licensed; 90,000+ academic contributors; 30M+ monthly readers across 14 editions. The dominant model for direct academic-to-public communication.
  • Massive Science — Science communication by active researchers; long-form explainers and original reporting; aims to close the gap between research and public understanding by keeping scientists as the primary voice.
  • Science Media Centre — UK charity that helps scientists work with the press; provides rapid-reaction expert commentary on breaking science news; operates fast-turnaround "expert reaction" service used by major media outlets. Analogues in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
  • SciLine (AAAS) — Free service connecting journalists with scientists for background and expert comment; runs journalist-scientist matching, webinars, and training programmes.

Craft & Practice

  • The Open Notebook — Craft-focused resource for science journalists; in-depth interviews on reporting process, pitch databases, and story-dissection analyses. The closest thing to a professional development hub for science writers.
  • Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science — Science communication training programme based on improvisation and connection techniques; used by researchers across disciplines; the leading institutional approach to scientist communication training.
  • Sense About Science — UK charity promoting evidence-based public discourse; resources on how to respond to media misrepresentation, including the Making Sense of Statistics and Making Sense of Uncertainty guides.

Frameworks

  • Brian Trench & Massimiano Bucchi — Public engagement with science: a practical guide. The standard analytical framework tracing the field's evolution from the deficit model (public lacks knowledge) through the dialogue model to participatory co-production; foundational for designing engagement programs. Journal of Science Communication, 2026.
  • JCOM — Journal of Science Communication. Peer-reviewed open-access journal covering theory and practice of science communication; free to publish and read; most cited venue in the field.

Output & Publishing

Preprint Servers

  • arXiv — The original preprint server (1991); physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, economics, statistics; 2M+ papers; the norm in these fields. Operated by Cornell and funded by the Simons Foundation.
  • bioRxiv — Preprint server for biology (2013); 250,000+ preprints; accelerated dramatically during COVID-19. By Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
  • medRxiv — Preprint server for clinical medicine and public health (2019); rapid dissemination of time-sensitive health research. By Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Yale, and BMJ.
  • SSRN — Working paper repository for social sciences, economics, law, and humanities; 1.2M+ papers; widely used in economics and law before journal submission.
  • PsyArXiv — Preprint server for psychology and related fields; hosted on OSF.
  • EarthArXiv — Preprint server for earth and planetary sciences.
  • engrXiv — Preprint server for engineering.

Open Access Models & Policy

  • Budapest Open Access Initiative. The founding document of open access (2002); defines OA and articulates the two primary routes — self-archiving (green) and open-access journals (gold). Still the canonical reference for OA policy design.
  • Plan S / cOAlition S. European mandate requiring all research funded by member agencies (including Wellcome, NWO, and most European national funders) to be immediately open access; no embargo; launched 2018, effective 2021. The most consequential OA policy initiative to date.
  • SciELO — Latin American and South African diamond open-access platform; 1,400+ journals; no APCs for authors or readers; the largest diamond OA infrastructure in the world.
  • Ralf Schimmer, Kai Geschuhn & Andreas Vogler — Disrupting the subscription journals' business model. Quantitative argument that transitioning all subscriptions to APCs would not increase costs for research institutions; the empirical foundation for "transformative agreements." Max Planck Digital Library, 2015.

Publishing Reform Models

  • eLife's New Publishing Model. From 2023, eLife no longer makes accept/reject decisions; all reviewed submissions are published as Reviewed Preprints with public referee reports and author responses; the most consequential structural experiment in mainstream journal publishing. Announced 2022, implemented 2023.
  • Peer Community In (PCI) — Free, transparent, and open community peer review of preprints; positive recommendation enables publication in PCI-friendly journals without re-review; covers ecology, evolutionary biology, genomics, neuroscience, and 20+ other fields.
  • F1000Research — Open-access publisher using fully transparent, post-publication peer review; all reviewer reports and author responses published alongside articles; the operational template for post-publication peer review at scale.
  • SHERPA/RoMEO — Database of journal and publisher open access policies; searchable by journal or publisher; used to determine pre-print and post-print archiving rights. By JISC.

Open Peer Review

  • OpenReview — Platform for open, transparent peer review; used by NeurIPS, ICLR, and other major ML conferences; public reviewer identities and reports; enables community discussion of submissions.

AI-Assisted Peer Review

  • Refine.ink — AI peer review identifying methodological weaknesses before submission.
  • Coarse — Open-source AI tool for methodological review; alternative to proprietary peer review systems.
  • Reviewer3 — AI peer review platform simulating expert reviewer feedback.
  • ReviewerZero.ai — AI peer review system.
  • Q.E.D. Science — AI peer review providing qualitative methodological feedback.

Policy Documents

  • Astera Open Science Policy. Open science policy adopted by Astera Institute; covers data, code, and publication sharing practices for an independent research organization operating outside traditional academic incentive structures.

Intellectual Property