Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Joseph DeBruin. Joseph is the Head of Product Management at ResearchGate, where he applies the scientific training he learned as a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins toward building products for ResearchGate’s network of users. He was formerly Head of Growth at Feastly, which was acquired by ChefsFeed in 2018.

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” – Eliel Saarinen, Finnish/American architect

The world has gotten pretty opinionated about how scientific communication should be designed, and most of what has been published has fallen into one of two camps:

• Camp A) The COVID crisis has torn down the walls of science and cranked the speed dial to 12. Instead of traditional journal publishing which takes months, preprints are exploding, “a global collaboration unlike any in history” is happening in real-time, and an old system is finally getting the overhaul it needed!
• Camp B) We are seeing the first true social “infodemic.” Misinformation is everywhere, most of what is out there “isn’t even science,” and governments are cracking down on social media platforms and scientific publishers to dramatically limit the content that makes it online.