Our mission:

We build platforms to make science more reproducible as well as provide educational assistance and non-financial services to researchers. We do this in terms of reproducibility of experiments but also more importantly in reproducibility of ideas. We are dedicated to improving the process of scientific research using technology.

History:

The Institute for Reproducible Research is a United States 501(c)3 nonprofit (EIN: 46-5721157). It was founded in 2013 by Joseph Paul Cohen and Henry Z. Lo while they were graduate students in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The first project was to create the platform Academic Torrents in order to make sharing and accessing data easier for them.

Project – Academic Torrents (2013-present):

Academics Torrents was founded to address the needs of science in the era of big data. It is a scalable platform using BitTorrent which distributes the cost of hosting data in order to prevent the rise and fall of dataset hosting providers and the erasure of the data they host. Researchers are empowered to mirror data they are working with and share large datasets without the large costs typically associated with commercial providers. 

Project – ShortScience.org (2016-present):

ShortScience.org is a platform for post-publication discussion aiming to improve accessibility and reproducibility of research ideas. Reading summaries of papers is useful to obtain the perspective and insight of another reader, why they liked or disliked it, and their attempt to demystify complicated sections. Also, writing summaries is a good exercise to understand the content of a paper because you are forced to challenge your assumptions when explaining it.

Our volunteer team:

Joseph Paul Cohen, PhD	Henry Z. Lo, PhD	Jonathan Nogueira

Email the team at or