An initiative from the scientific community to put all available resources at the service of the fight against COVID-19.
Motivation: Most current plans to fight COVID-19 rely on the assumption that treatments and/or vaccines will be available in a few months. Delays in these treatments will have enormous consequences, both in terms of economic impact and human lives.
Aim: Put the wider scientific community at the service of COVID-19 research.
Context: There is now a huge pool of highly skilled scientists, willing to volunteer their time and expertise for this cause. This goes from virologists who don't have the resources to get directly involved with COVID-19 to researchers in other disciplines (bioinformatics, image analysis, AI…). This is a huge resource, the "bottleneck" being coordination.
Our proposal: This is a service for COVID-19 researchers. They only need to state a wish or a task, which can go from a simple time-intensive task to be performed (e.g. transcribe data, manually annotate images), to answering a technical question which is beyond their expertise, or to setting up a collaboration. They only need to explain their request in a few lines. Then, another scientist makes the effort of understanding that request and making it reality.
Of course, everything is for free. This platform works thanks to scientists who donate their time and skill in these times of emergency.