Ask HN: Battery Research with an Open Science Community, Does It Exist?

4 points

10 years ago

Increased energy density while cutting marginal costs is a hard problem with significant payoffs. Breakthroughs would unlock new business models and welfare effects from robotics, transportation, disaster relief and feasibility of carbon neutral energy production. However, research in this domain with but a few examples [1] is characterized by proprietary R&D.

On the contrary, we've seen great collective achievements over the last years in a variety of fields:

  - gitxiv.org, arxiv.org: Various CS subdomains, math, physics
  - gym.openai.org: Reinforcement learning
  - www.fold.it: Protein modelling

The list goes on and is accompanied by controversial but factual initiatives towards public research becoming free as in FOSS [2]. According to Franzoni & Sauermann (2014) [3], the main criteria for effective open science communities are:

  - sharing of intermediate results
  - openness to participation

The ideal platform would thus be effective in breaking down problems to crowd-scientists and enable attribution of teams and individuals (better than on a subreddit). This post is both a question and proposal towards evangelists who would like to join such a project.

Are there any open online communities for battery research? If not, what are communities closest to the domain and potentially receptive? Which journals publish work that is ahead or on par with closed R&D?

  [1] Tesla's stance on the use of its patents
  [2] sci-hub
  [3] Franzoni, C., & Sauermann, H. (2014). Crowd science: The organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects. Research Policy, 43(1), 1–20. doi:10.1016/j.respol.2013.07.005