International Research Network

Research is hard, slow and often lonely. A question that stalls one lab for a year may be something another field solved long ago, if only the two people could meet.

What is the IRN?

The Local Solar System Foundation International Research Network (IRN) is a closed online network where researchers discuss research, hypotheses and theories with each other before anything is published. Access is limited to researchers whose work we have checked. The IRN is free, has no advertising, never sells or shares members’ data, and is moderated by its own members. It is paid for from the Local Solar System Foundation Treasury, which has been funded by the founders since the project began in 2017.

A question asked in one field can meet its answer in another.

The IRN is now building its waiting list. It opens field by field as soon as enough verified researchers in that field have joined. Join the waiting list and invite the colleagues you would most like to talk to.

What members will be able to do

We asked what researchers actually miss: not another social network, but the small, practical things that save months. These are the tools we are building. When you join, you choose the ones that matter most to you, and we build the most wanted first. The live results of that vote are at the bottom of this page.

Field rooms

A private room for each field, where members post questions, early results and ideas. Conversations are threaded and searchable, so a good answer keeps helping the next person who asks.

Ask another field

Many problems are only hard inside one discipline. A statistician may have solved your sampling problem years ago; a materials scientist may know why your detector drifts. Post a question to another field’s room in plain language, and members there can answer without needing to know your jargon.

Feedback on drafts before you submit

Share a draft paper, grant proposal or poster with a few members you choose, and get honest, friendly comments before journal reviewers see it. Drafts stay visible only to the people you invite, and you can withdraw them at any time.

Find collaborators

Every member has a short profile: field, methods, instruments, languages and an optional ORCID iD. Search it to find someone who knows a technique you need, or who works on the same object from another angle.

Instruments, facilities and data

Tell the network what you can offer and what you need: time on a telescope or a mass spectrometer, a dataset, samples, a clean room, fieldwork help on another continent. Small, informal exchanges between labs are often faster than formal access programmes.

Negative results and dead ends

Most experiments that did not work are never published, so others repeat them. Members can record what they tried and why it failed, in a private archive that only other members can search. It saves time, money and animals.

Journal club

Discuss a published paper with members from several fields, linked by its DOI. Ask the question you would not ask at a conference, and hear how people in other disciplines read the same result.

Funding calls and co-applicants

Share open calls, and find partners from other countries or disciplines when a call asks for an international or interdisciplinary team.

Replication requests

Ask whether another lab could repeat a key measurement, or offer to replicate someone else’s. Independent replication makes a result stronger and is rarely rewarded elsewhere.

Dated idea notebook

Write down an idea privately and the network records a timestamp and a cryptographic fingerprint of it. You can later show that you had the idea on that date, without revealing it to anyone before you are ready. It makes sharing early ideas less risky.

Mentoring

Early-career researchers can ask experienced members for advice on methods, careers, publishing and grant writing, across borders and outside their own department.

Methods and statistics clinic

Short, practical help with experimental design, statistics, code and data analysis from members who enjoy explaining them.

Write in your own language

The Local Solar System Foundation already translates its site into more than 60 languages. In the IRN you will be able to write in your own language and read others in yours, with the original always one click away, so language is not a barrier to good science.

Who can join

The IRN is for people who do research: doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, researchers at institutes and in industry, independent researchers with a track record, and emeriti. You do not need to work in space science: every field is welcome, because the most useful connections are often between fields.

When you register we ask for your name, affiliation, fields and, if you have one, your ORCID iD or a page listing your work. A member of the Council checks each registration by hand before the network opens. An institutional email address makes that quicker.

Opening when enough people have joined

A network is only useful if the right people are in it. So the IRN does not open to a handful of people: each field’s room opens once 25 verified researchers in that field have joined, and the network as a whole opens at 300 verified researchers across at least six fields. You can follow the numbers live below and on your own waiting-list page.

The quickest way to get there is to invite colleagues. After registering you get a personal link to share and a simple form to invite up to 25 colleagues by email. We write to each of them once, in your name, and only because you asked; every invitation lets the person opt out of all future invitations with one click.

House rules

• Nothing leaves the room. Nothing discussed on the IRN is made public unless every participant in the discussion explicitly agrees. Conversations follow the Chatham House Rule by default: you may use what you learn, but not say who said it.
• Your ideas stay yours. Sharing an idea on the IRN never gives the foundation or other members any rights to it.
• Peers, not a hierarchy. Conversations are exchanges between colleagues, with no central authority steering them. Members moderate the rooms.
• No advertising, no fees, no data sales. We keep only what we need to run the network. See our privacy notice.

Joining

Joining is free and takes two minutes. Join the waiting list. If you have questions first, contact us.

The waiting list, live

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