Introducing Thinkable Peer Prizes to gauge the collective voice of a scientific field(s)

At Thinkable our mission is to drive engagement, collaboration & funding for researchers around the world to make breakthroughs. Small labs up to big organisations have been using our open competition platform to host annual awards via either a set list of invited judges or via peoples choice awards to allow public engagement with research.

Peer-review however, is the foundation for how science progresses society. Peer review is a self-regulated vetting of knowledge by other experts that filters out unscientific opinion or wild claims not based around reproducible observations. As a long-time researcher, engaging with my peers is critically important since they are the ones which will be reviewing my papers & grants or reusing and citing my research.

Relying on just a few peers within one specialist field to award research can create problems however, particularly for multi-disciplinary research which is so important for future grand challenges. I’ve noticed the ability to engage with research in relevant adjacent fields is getting more difficult. Both researchers or the public also don’t have an existing way to learn from other fields and/or gauge the collective voice of wider scientific experts.

To try and overcome these problems, we have just launched a new type of research competition called ‘Peer Awards’ which allow organisers to engage a broad range of global experts across fields in order to drive collaboration & expert consensus.

When hosting a Thinkable competition, organisers can now create a category that allows verified researchers to openly vote and award the winners. Instead of selecting ‘Member’ or ‘Judge’ — select ‘Researcher’. For that particular category, only verified researchers will have access to review and vote on the winners.

We are very excited to launch our first ‘Peer Prize’ — with the generous support from the Sun Foundation. If your lab or organisation is interested in hosting your own ‘Peer Award’ we’d love to help you.

Ben McNeil

Founder & Chief Scientist, Thinkable.org