Important: If your research is related to COVID-19, go here. You will have priority, won’t need an invitation, and will be able to make more general requests.
If your research project needs a skill that you don’t have, we will put you in contact with an adequate expert who will help you via videoconference, e-mail or any other means.
These are requests that:
Typical examples:
You can also request collaborators for long-term projects (typically resulting in co-authorship of papers).
To make a request, fill the following form. For more information, see our Frequently Asked QuestionsWe will locate an expert in any field you need, and will put you in contact with them, so that they can advise you via videoconference, e-mail or any other means.
The general rule is that it must require up to 1-2 hours from another researcher, and will save you a lot of time. Any request that can be addressed remotely and fulfills these conditions is eligible, but some examples are the following:
Any scientist in the biomedical sciences (for now you need to be invited and have a token). Scientists at any career stage can make a request, but they must be affiliated to an active research lab within a professional scientific institution.
Any kind whatsoever. We are particularly focused on fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations, so you can request the help from an expert in any discipline.
No.
No. This service is only for scientists doing professional work.
Acknowledgment is appreciated, but not necessary. Experts will dedicate up to 1-2 hours to help you without any specific compensation (we document the process so that experts can show this activity as part of their CV). However, acknowledging the help of the expert in any publication would be nice. Acknowledging our platform is not a requirement either, but we also appreciate it. For example, you can use the sentence “The authors acknowledge the help of name_of_expert, contacted through Crowdfight (https://crowdfight.org)”.
Then we may not be able to help you.
Then it’s between you and the expert. Some requests may become long-term collaborations, in which the usual rules of scientific collaboration should apply (including co-authorship when appropriate). These long-term collaborations are a great by-product of our work, and we are happy to facilitate them, but we take no part in them.
Make the request anyway, and explain your doubts. We will tell you whether we can handle it or not.
We aim for a 1-week turnaround time. You should get our first answer within hours, including a feasibility estimate, and you should be in touch with the expert within a week.
Recommending an expert is totally optional, and only applies for a minority of the requests. Besides finding the experts and contacting them, our mission is to provide the right incentives by documenting the whole process so that the experts get credit for helping you. For this and other reasons, it makes sense to contact certain experts through our platform even if you could do it directly.
Crowdfight is a non-profit, run by volunteer scientists and engineers. We started to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are doing this because we believe that it will benefit science and will make scientists’ lives easier. While most of the team members are scientists, Crowdfight is independent of our institutions.