Do you have to hold down a job as a professional scientist to do real, high-quality, theoretical science research? We don't think so.

We believe that there's untapped potential in the gap between professional science and citizen science. We've named this space denizen science. Denizen scientists have the skills of professional scientists, but they do science research outside of their day job. Denizen scientists include ex-academics, independent researchers, professional scientists with research interests outside of the scope of their grants or day jobs, and up-and-coming scientists who have the technical background to do scientific research but who might not have access to the mentorship they need.

To tap into this potential, we need a mechanism for effective collaboration between scientists that does not rely on pre-established collaboration networks, where each person can contribute according to their skills, interests, and availability. The mechanism we have in mind is a framework which we call DRiP (Doing Research in Public).

How does it work?

To begin with, the research process has to be made modular. We break it down into:

• Having a seed of an idea
• Fleshing out that idea into a well-formed scientific problem
• Doing a literature review (which itself can be broken down into pieces)
• Identifying the different pieces of the research itself (a proof here, a creative step there, etc)
• Doing each of the pieces of the research
• The many sequential steps of writing the paper
• And more...

Normally, researchers do these steps organically, and keep track of them in their heads, or in their personal notes, or in notes shared with a few select collaborators. But within the DRiP framework, each of these steps is done in public, so that different steps can be done by different people at their leisure, and anyone can join the project at any time. For this to work, we must commit to documenting our process clearly and work within an explictly defined shared praxis.

Among other things, we advocate doing research for the inherent joy and the sense of meaning it brings. But we also believe that receiving credit for ones work is important. We therefore need to do this work on a platform that will keep a time-stamped record of everyone's contributions, from proposing a seed of an idea to editing the last draft of a paper.

What we're proposing is already common practice in the world of open source software development. There, GitHub (and similar platforms) are used to do collaborative software development. While GitHub is not designed for our purposes, we believe it is currently the best option we have, so we'll take it.

The idea of GitHub for science/academic research has been proposed before (see e.g. vonMuhlen2011 and Banks2017) but there the focus was on the value of sharing the output of scientifc research in an open way. Our focus is on the process of collaboration that is enabled by GitHub and collaborative software development best practices. This is what we want to adapt to scientific research.

Want to know more?

You can start by perusing the wiki and the discussion forum.

If you're interested in helping develop DRiP, check out the meta project board to see which tasks are available and could use your help.

If you want to know more about using DRiP to do research, take a peak at the research project board, but keep in mind that the framework is still in its early stages of being developed, so it's not usable yet...please sit tight!

If you would like to join this effort, get in touch!