Medium has struck a chord. It’s stories resonate with us all and it’s clean lines and ability for anyone to communicate openly is changing how stories are told. When I first discovered Medium I thought, “What a simple idea: make blogging beautiful.” And they did. It isn’t crowded with tacky advertisements, pop-ups, or other gimmicks that may help search engine optimization but ultimately hurt user experience. It is writing—pure and simple.

Medium not only benefits from the aesthetics it provides to readers and writers but also from the community it fosters. Everyday individuals next to professional writers, one can hardly keep track of who is who. This de-emphasis of the writer serves to illuminate the ideas further, it’s no wonder it’s called Medium as everything they do points to the writing. Indeed, I don’t remember a single author’s name, but I quite vividly remember the stories. The scientist who experimented with buying Twitter followers, the young girl who had succeeded in starting her company on closet organization yet failed for other reasons. Great pieces, not by Carl Zimmer, Matthew Herper, or Nicholas Kristof, but by people like you and I—people not journalists. How could we have missed Medium? Blogs have been around for a while and even many look of equal quality to Medium. So what is it? It’s the community.

At the same time I had discovered Medium, I was in the process of building my own publishing platform, The Winnower. I never envisioned that the two could be so similar, until now. The Winnower was founded to combat the numerous problems that affect how scientists publish, a process that has been called “broken” time and time again. And indeed it is, it costs thousands of dollars for scientists to publish their tax-funded research, and the whole process is slow, anonymous, and ineffective. Science publishing is the opposite of Medium. The emphasis is where you publish not what you publish. It’s disgusting in principle, in design, and perhaps even worse in the eyes of a scientist: it is unscientific.

The Winnower aims to change this by doing to scientific blogs what Medium did to personal blogs. There are thousands of scientists blogging, but they do so in isolated venues and more often then not their site looks like crap. The Winnower aims to be a community where ideas and audience are built off each other. The Winnower aims to be the Medium of scientific publishing.