After hearing the name, MachPrinciple.com, the first thing that will come in your mind, is its all about some creepy theoretical physics idea. As an astrophysicist, at first, I also thought so. However, after going through the website I found out, that it is actually a serious endeavor to bring general public and academicians to in a single platform, to help them to connect with each other, to share their knowledge, and to find latest discoveries in the field of their interest.
According to Dr. Santanu Das (CEO MachPrinciple.com), “Common people like to hear about science if it is said in a simple way”. Any scientific research takes years of painstaking and sometimes frustrating research to develop a technique. So, it’s important to spread the knowledge that a researcher gather through the research. That’s why people write research papers and the academic journals spread the research across the scientific community. However, as the researches are getting highly focused its really difficult or sometimes humanly impossible for scientists to read the research papers from outside community and hence the interdisciplinary communication is very poor throughout the scientific community.
MachPrinciple.com is just like LinkedIn for academicians, it’s a real networking website. Signup is free and most basic services come at no charge. User profiles can include education, experience, academic papers, awards, skills and so forth.
MachPrinciple.com is not like research gate or academia.edu where all the users are researchers. Goal of MachPrinciple.com is to connect general public and academicians. Because of the site’s focus, it’s likely that many non-academics to be in the platform, however most of the people in the platform are science enthusiasts.
In MachPrinciple.com you can share your research in two different ways. You can write short scraps in your scrapbook and those will be visible on your followers’ scrapbook. The scraps are not verified by admin. On the other had you can write articles, which will then be verified by admin before displaying on the research section of the website. The review process by admin is not a peer reviewed process, but it helps to stop the spam posts or misinformation.
MachPrinciple.com was started by the Dr. Santanu Das, who is an astrophysicist at UW Madison and Fermilab. So far, this idea seems to be working. People are using Machprinciple.com as the one stop for finding all the latest science discoveries.