Pull Up a Seat to a Safe Harbor

by Future Historian September 30, 2021

We wouldn’t be where are without the amazing open source communities that thrive around the internet, full stop.

Anytime I had a debugging problem when putting together PubTrawlr or Readiness Learning Systems, I could almost always get back on the right track by going through posts on Stack Overflow or Medium.

So why isn’t there anything like that for science? Okay, back up. There is something like that for science; it’s called SCIENCE. Ideas get proposed, tested, and interpreted in manuscripts. A group of experts carefully review the findings and decided what it would take to strengthen the article. It then gets published. But where does discussion around those articles happen?

Back when I was a graduate student, professors often had us post weekly comments on readings or write up article critiques. This was a super useful activity, but I never really found any place online that replicated that experience. Reddit’s r/science forum is pretty good but comes with the normal Reddit caveats.

PubTrawlr is about getting good ideas out of the journals and into the hands of people who can use it. Many times, that requires careful consideration and discussion. So Zim’s team built Safe Harbor.

Safe Harbor is a place to discuss articles: the questions, methods, results, and implications. We want it to be a place to ease learning, but also to provide deeper (and faster) critiques than what would normally be possible.

We’ve made Safe Harbor totally free with a registered account. So, sign up and start talking.