Platform tour · 13 chapters
A verified research profile, groups for your lab and institution, and one place to publish, hire, run events and raise money for research. Explore each chapter or jump to a feature using the chapter links below.
No account needed to explore. Profiles, groups and campaigns shown here are illustrative examples; the demo controls do not publish content or take payments.
How OpenWorldLab works: groups, funding and fees01 · Profile
Your profile brings your career stage, verified affiliations, ORCID iD, links elsewhere, and everything you publish onto one page.
Dr Amara Okafor
@amara-okafor • Postdoctoral Researcher
Ocean acoustics and machine learning. Listening to how marine ecosystems change, one hydrophone at a time.
12
Articles
86
Sparks
341
Followers
198
Following
From student to professor, plus clinicians, industry researchers, science communicators, funders and interested members of the public. The stage shows next to your name.
A square avatar and a wide 4:1 cover banner, for a lab photo or a figure from your work.
Up to eight areas from the research taxonomy, as broad or as specific as you like. They list you under those areas, so people browsing a field can find you.
Collaboration, supervising students, or new opportunities. Each one you tick appears as a label on your profile.
02 · ORCID & institutions
Anyone can type a job title. A tick on OpenWorldLab means something was proven: that you control an ORCID record, or a mailbox at an institution.
Proven by signing in to ORCID
Proven by an address on the institution's domain
Signed in with your university's Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account? Then the address is already proven and the affiliation is verified straight away, with no link to click.
A current affiliation. Try leaving it.
03 · Social links
25 platforms, from Google Scholar and arXiv to GitHub, Hugging Face and Bluesky. Groups can add the same links to their pages.
Where your publications are indexed
Repositories, models and datasets
Where people can follow you
Either works. A full address is reduced to the part that identifies you, which is what gets saved, and anything that is not a valid profile is caught before it is. Pick a platform on the left to try another.
Recognised
04 · Publishing
Sparks are for what happened in the lab this week. Articles are for the explanation that needs room. Both appear on your profile and in the feed.
Dr Amara Okafor @amara-okafor · 2h
Recovered all six hydrophones from the bay this morning, 212 days of recordings and not one flooded housing. Planning the next build now, and I'd like your opinion:
Dr Amara Okafor · 9 min read · Marine Ecology › Bioacoustics
Each detection is scored against the background noise of the bay. For a call with received level L over noise N, we keep it when
SNR = 10 log10(L/N) > 12 dB
def keep(call, noise):
return snr_db(call, noise) > 12Headings, LaTeX maths, syntax-highlighted code, tables and images. Articles are filed under research areas, so they show up for people browsing those fields.
Replies nest under the comment they answer, up to 512 characters each, so a side discussion does not bury the main one.
For posts and for individual comments. Your likes are listed on your profile.
Share a post to your followers as it is, or quote it with a comment of your own.
Save anything to read later. Your bookmarks are a tab on your profile.
Everything on the platform, or only the people and groups you follow. Each splits into articles and sparks.
Members with the right privilege can publish under their group’s name, and it appears on the group’s page.
05 · Groups
A group is a shared home for a team: one address, its members, and everything the team publishes, hires for, hosts and raises money for.
University of Northbridge Faculty of Science Department of Biology
Marine Ecology Lab
/group/northbridge-marine-ecology • Research Group / Lab
How coastal ecosystems respond to warming seas, measured from the seabed up: acoustic monitoring, field surveys and open data.
14
Members
1208
Followers
37
Articles
2
Open jobs
3
Upcoming events
Chosen when the group is created. It decides where the group is listed and how it reads in an organisation chart.
Research Group / Lab
A team led by one or more principal investigators conducting focused research within a specific domain.
A permanent page at /group/your-lab, with a logo, banner, overview and links.
Sparks and articles published under the group’s name by the members allowed to.
Vacancies and events listed on the group page and on the platform-wide boards.
A private room for every member. Joining the group lets you in; leaving it takes you out.
Campaigns for specific pieces of work, paid into the group’s own Stripe account.
How the group’s posts, events and campaigns are read, and by what kind of audience.
Reports about the group’s content go to its moderators first, who can escalate to the platform.
Anyone can follow a group and see what it publishes in their Following feed.
06 · Group hierarchy
Groups link into the real shape of an organisation. A lab’s articles, jobs, events and campaigns also appear on its department’s page and on the university’s, without anyone posting twice.
Click a group to see its page the way a visitor would.
Department
From 3 groups: Department of Biology, Marine Ecology Lab, Coastal Sensing Centre.
From the group dashboard: the other group sits above yours, below it, or alongside it as an affiliate.
Its admins approve or decline. Nobody can put a group under an institution without the institution saying yes.
An accepted link can be cut by either group at any time, and the content stops rolling up at once.
07 · Roles & privileges
Five roles, each a preset across 31 separate privileges. Anyone can be given a privilege their role lacks, or have one taken away, without changing their role.
Moderator. Looks after content: edits or removes any post, runs the job and event boards, and handles reports.
12 of 31 by default
Let a member run the job board, or let a comms officer post campaign updates without seeing who donated. Only what you change is stored; everything else keeps following the role. You can never hand out a privilege you do not hold yourself.
When a PI moves on, the owner can transfer the group to another member in a few clicks, keeping its posts, links and campaign history. The previous owner stays on as an admin. Every change of role or privilege is recorded.
08 · Jobs & events
Groups list their vacancies and events on their own page. Each one also appears on the platform-wide job board and events directory, and on the pages of the groups above.
Marine Ecology Lab · University of Northbridge
Coastal Sensing Centre · Hybrid
09 · Fundraising
A campaign says what the money buys and who will spend it. Contributions go straight to the group running it, minus a 5% fee that already includes card processing.
Marine Ecology Lab
£6,725.00 of £9,000.00 reached the group
Two funding models: keep everything raised towards one goal, or fund the budget one line at a time as above, each line marked funded as it is met.
The checkout shows this before anyone pays. Groups can choose to let backers cover the fee, so the whole amount arrives.
The group connects its own Stripe account, verified in the group’s name. OpenWorldLab never holds the money.
A campaign is drafted, then submitted. A reviewer approves it or asks for changes before it can take contributions.
The group posts updates on the campaign page as the work goes on, so backers see what their money did.
Contribute under your name or anonymously, and find every contribution you have made in your settings.
10 · Messages
Private messages between researchers, a chat room for every group, and notifications on the web, on your phone, or by email.
Dr Tomás Reyes
Coastal Sensing Centre
Saw your spark about the hydrophones. Which housings did you use?
Off-the-shelf pressure housings, rated to 200 m. Happy to share the build notes.
That would be great. We’re deploying off Harbour Point in the spring 🌊
Sending them now. Let’s compare recordings afterwards?
Accept an invitation and you are in it; leave the group and you are out. Nobody has to manage a separate member list for the chat.
Push to your devices. Install OpenWorldLab to your home screen and get notifications like any other app.
Or by email. Sent only to the address you choose as primary, never to the others on your account.
11 · Discovery & tools
Search everything at once, browse a field from the top down, and follow a paper’s citations through the literature.
Type once and see matching results across every collection. Press Ctrl K or ⌘ K from any page to jump to it.
Every article, job, event, person, group and campaign can be filed under research areas. Open an area to see all of it in one place, or explore how the disciplines nest inside each other.
Open the research area explorerStart from any paper and follow what it cites and what cites it, as an interactive graph built on OpenAlex’s open catalogue of scholarly work.
Try it on a paper about seal pupsAnd some small tools we built for ourselves and kept public:
12 · Badges & analytics
Badges mark what you have done on the platform. Analytics show who is reading what you publish, for you and for every group you help run.
Earned by writing, discussing, curating and building groups, in tiers that get harder to reach. Some are given by hand for work the platform cannot see. Each one shows how many members hold it.
Readers grouped by what they do, from their career stage. A sample breakdown:
Small groups of readers are merged before they are shown, so no figure can single anyone out.
13 · Account & safety
Strong sign-in options for you, and clear ways to deal with anything that should not be here.
With a password, or with GitHub, Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft. Connecting a provider adds a way in; it never replaces your password.
Add an authenticator app, and get 10 single-use recovery codes in case you lose your phone.
See where your account is signed in and sign out any device you don’t recognise.
A personal address that outlasts every job, plus institutional ones. You choose which can be used to sign in.
Any post, message, profile, group and campaign can be reported, for one of 14 reasons:
OpenWorldLab takes no ownership of, and no licence over, your research, your data or anything that comes of it.
Everything we keep about you, and why, is set out in the privacy policy.
Report a problem privately, or suggest a feature on the feedback page.
Getting started
Each one links to the page where it is done.
With an email address, or with an account you already have elsewhere.
Add an affiliation and confirm the address on its domain.
Then your interests, so people in your field can find you.
Ask to be invited to your lab’s group, or set one up and link it to your department.
A spark about what you are working on this week is enough to start.