MiniManuscript A Technology project from London Borough of Camden, London by annaremington

We’re not lazy, we just don’t like doing things the longwinded way. Being optimistic (and slightly deluded), we call this efficiency – why waste time when it’s the most precious thing we have?

Time wasting is one of the world’s greatest problems (we may have made that up but it sounds true); it’s much worse than global warming (we also made that up and it probably isn’t true).

In academia time wasting is a big issue. We all have to read a massive amount of literature for any project we do - it’s a huge task and yet for some reason we each decide to do the wholelot ourselves. It’s total madness! We need to divide and conquer!

Imagine if each person in the world took just a few papers and read them, between us we could cover the lot.

And that’s exactly what MiniManuscript does – we’ve created a worldwide academicsuperbrain (Jake had a dream about that once) that uses a collaborative approach to reading papers so we can pool our resources, increase efficiency and free up valuable time for the finer things in life, like data collection (or Facebook).

MiniManuscript is a website where users write summaries of research papers that they’ve read. By reading the summaries, you can spend 2 minutes rather than 2 hours deciding whether a paper is relevant to you.

We’re a bit like watching the trailers before deciding which film to go to – they don’t replace the full feature but it means you only see the ones you really want to. Some might say we’re the speed dating of the manuscript world. We give you a quick taster, that crucial first impression and we let you decide whether you want to take things further.

What can you do on MiniManuscript.com?

You can search for a topic, author or specific paper, read the summary, check who’s contributed, feel free to improve it and browse other media formats. You can also keep track of the papers you’re reading by writing your own summary and uploading related media content. It’s a great platform for publicising your own research and showcasing your science communication.

The website's about to go live, but to make it a success we desperately need some content. We'd love to have at least 500 summaries before we launch…. so we need your help.

We would be so grateful if you could sponsor some summaries! For just £5 you can pay for a willing, impoverished student to write some!

Or, if you fancy having a go yourself, that would be equally amazing!… Just send us the summary of an academic paper (including the details of the paper and a summarised method and results section). Give us a shout at info@minimanuscript.com if you want any more information.

Thanks so much, we really appreciate your support!

The MiniManuscript Team - saving the world, one summary at a time.