Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

Note: The following is an earnest suggestion and not just a recruiting plug, but it is also a recruiting plug. If this is not an appropriate place for this content then comment and I'll remove (I do not frequently HackerNews)!

Personally, I believe the highest leverage thing we can do to promote scientific research is to help connect the dots between related discoveries in the service of bringing new ideas to commercialization/impact as quickly and reliably as possible. I joined Citrine (https://citrine.io/platform/) a few years ago thinking that we would help accelerate research by direct support - building simulation, data, and machine learning tools for scientists. It became clear very quickly that the community was already in a pretty strong position (smart cookies, those research scientists) on that front. The biggest opportunity turned out to be scaling expert knowledge - bridging the no man's land from ideation to scale-up, integration, and manufacturing. At Citrine, we're building infrastructure that helps researchers contribute to an organization-wide knowledge graph capable of supporting inference in the scale-up or manufacturing context based on relationships learned in the R&D phase. This fundamentally changes the ROI calculus for basic research because it can plausibly support the entire product life cycle.

If this sounds exciting to you, then consider joining us! We just raised a Series B and are growing quickly.

If you have an applied math and software eng. background and want to help generalize and scale our property inference infrastructure, then I think you'd enjoy working with me and my team in SSE: https://citrine.io/careers/#scientific-software-engineer.

If you have a backend software eng background and want to build distributed services for scientists and engineers at some of the biggest materials and chemicals companies in the world, join us in engineering: https://citrine.io/careers/#sr-backend-software-engineer.

>>> Indexing all open research

I'd also check out analytics platforms such as VIVO. End goal is a universal workflow for all research, discovery and collaboration. Solving this problem will have immediate impact. For example, computational epidemiology and containing Ebola outbreaks in "hot zones" hundreds of miles apart.

Web of Science

https://clarivate.com/products/web-of-science/

Great idea, would love to see it.

Related, there were journals like this at some point, e.g. International Journal of Negative & Null Results, or ournal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, and I think at least one more. Not sure how they fare, though.

So as someone working in application of medicines, I'd agree with the comments that say those of us doing these things have learn to make code work, but are not software engineers (and would not claim to be). This means that if you can improve the tools that are used (and don't care about making a return), the leverage would be massive.

I imagine it isn't trivial (otherwise it would have been done by now), but imagine if R was automatically parallel processing; seldom is the code in my field worth figuring out how to make it parallel, but if it was automatically, then a hell of a lot of time would be saved! I know there are two packages that kind of make it work, but so far I've yet to hit a threshold making it worth it (I just leave thigns running overnight).

Abstract from that to projects like Zotero and you can see how you could have an impact on a lot of people by enabling them to do what they do.