MachPrinciple, a new social platform for Academicians

January 20, 2019 at 23:51 PM EST

Madison, Jan 20, 2019 (Issuewire.com) - A new social network has set up to connect scientists and science enthusiasts with the latest discoveries in the science and tech industry. The site, MachPrinciple.com, is launched in last December with a bold promise that it will change the way research is carried out across the world. Its powerful features will allow the scientific community to present their research work in front of a general audience. Scientists can interact with common people, exchange knowledge and improve the visibility of their research works.

Just a little background on MachPrinciple.com. It was founded by Dr. Santanu Das, an astrophysicist at UW Madison. He initially started it as a Wordpress blog, back in 2013, which then slowly turned into one of the most legitimate and friendly educational networks in the globe.

The importance of such a network can be understood by studying the growth of the media and entertainment industry in the past two decades. According to Das Just 20 years back, there used to be only a couple of TV channels and they used to telecast a handful set of movies and TV shows. The TV commercials used to be from a couple of big brands. However, with the improvements in technology, the number of movies and TV programs slowly increase, and we start seeing advertisements and promos of different TV shows, trailers of different upcoming movies. Thats because, as the number of programs increase, and promotion is the only option left, to get audiences.

He said, A similar thing is happening in the academia. It takes years of painstaking and sometimes frustrating research to develop a technique. So, its important to spread the knowledge that a researcher gather through the research. Thats why people write research papers and the academic journals spread the research across the scientific community. But with the invention of digital media, the number of research papers are increasing dramatically and most of the research works are getting unnoticed. According to a statistic, in 2015, there were more than 150,000 research papers published per month, more than 50% papers were never read except by the author, editor and the referee, and more than 90% papers were never cited. Another report showed that there were about 2,300,000 papers published in various disciplines in the year 2016. The research space is getting clutter day by day and the distribution of knowledge is getting slow. This is also because scientists, despite being great explorers in terms of knowledge, are very conservative about their practices. They distribute the knowledge, they gather through their research, in terms of different research papers. However, presently the researches are getting so much focus that its probably humanly not possible for a researcher to read and understand any research outside their own discipline. Therefore, sometimes it can take many years for a technique used in one discipline to be transferred to another and often it occurs by chance.

MachPrinciple.com provides scientists with a social platform where they can promote their research to the general audiences and people outside their own discipline. It will help to spread the interdisciplinary ideas faster. People love to hear about the latest discoveries in science if that is said in a simple way., Das said. In last decade different social networking websites for scientists, like ResearchGate or Academia.edu had done a wonderful job by promoting the open access of scientific works. This new network, MachPrinciple.com, is the next step towards that goal of making knowledge freely accessible

Apart from science popularization, the platform provides many other features, like it allows people to build their CV, list their publications, search different upcoming conferences, write feedbacks about different educational institutes and many more. As of now, the project is very much in its early stage. The site shows that presently there are about 9000 monthly active users. For now, the offerings of MachPrinciple.com are typical of other social networking sites, with nothing in the functionality that differs markedly from Facebook, LinkedIn except all the posts are related to science and technology. Das said that website is under development and claims to have a raft of applications in the pipeline.

MachPrinciple.com is not a network for scientists but for academicians. Hence everyone, starting from college students to professors, whoever is connected to academia is free to join and will gain from the network. People can use social network login feature to gain quick access to MachPrinciple.com and start using it.