Matters founder Lawrence Rajendran: the Lego approach to scientific publishing - EuroScientist journal

" ... Rajendran is both interested in science and science communication. With the creation of Matters, he wants to change the way we communicate science. His goal is to increase the crowdsourced dimension in science by encouraging teamwork. He has identified constraints associated with the storytelling approach in current scientific papers. Instead, he believes scientists should be able to submit all kinds of observations to help link orphan, negative, confirmatory and contradictory data together. He is in favour of triple-blind peer review to ensure that the observation is scientifically solid. 'I came up with this idea something like seven years ago' says Rajendran. He started to wonder about irreproducibility of science, incentives associated with scientists publishing on high-rated journals to help their carriers and the need for stories to publish observations. 'Every piece of the data that you publish needs to fit into a coherent story. And this is where I challenge this notion: why do we have to tell stories?' he asks. For him, the solution is to come up with a system that allows scientists to publish single observations. He explains that there is no reason to eliminate negative data, for example. This is why he created Matters, “A place where I can say 'look, I think A leads to B, this is my hypothesis, and when I experiment it, I find a positive result, I should be able to publish it. I find a negative result, I should be able to publish it. And then I can come back, I shouldn’t be asked extra additional things,' he explains before adding: that it would remove the risks that researchers are dishonest in the way they report their findings.  The Matters platform then makes it possible to connect individual observations ..."