About this site

Open Access, Open Data, Open Science and specifically the metadata, identifiers and infrastructure that decide what machines can actually find, read and reuse. The argument running through these essays is that most research output is still shaped for human readers, and that this has quietly become the bottleneck. If AI is going to do science, the substrate underneath it has to be better than it is.

So the writing here tends toward the unglamorous end: data citation corpora, DOI prevalence by country, whether "technically FAIR" and "actually reusable" are the same thing (they are not), and what peer review looks like when a large share of submissions are machine-written.

Working prototypes

Alongside the writing there are experiments: small, public, and built to produce data rather than to become products. You can find more about them at https://InfiniteResearchers.com/

• OpenScience.ai — what claims are already latent in open databases like ClinVar, GTEx and Open Targets that nobody has written up?
• Preprints.ai — how much of peer review is mechanical enough to score automatically?
• OpenAccess.ai — if you automate the editorial stack, what happens to the unit economics of publishing?
• FAIRdata.ai — can badly described public datasets be made genuinely reusable without a human curator?

Each one exists to answer a question I could not answer by arguing about it.

Who writes this

I'm Mark Hahnel. I founded Figshare while finishing a PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London, on the fairly naive thesis that if you make research data openly available, good things happen that you cannot predict. Figshare now provides research data infrastructure for institutions, publishers and funders globally, and I'm VP Open Research at Digital Science.

I sat on the board of DataCite and the advisory board for the Directory of Open Access Journals. I've served on the judging panel for the NIH / Wellcome Trust Open Science Prize and advised on the Springer Nature master classes.

More about me, and everything else I write, at hahnel.org.