World Pandemic Research Network (WPRN)

The World Pandemic Research Network: an innovation at the service of the international scientific community

At a time when the world is facing a major health challenge, the Natural and Life Sciences are mobilizing to find vaccines and remedies. At the same time, and without further delay, the Social Sciences and Humanities are moving to the forefront to help our societies face the wave of socio-economic crisis that will follow. This mobilization, because it is unprecedented, needs new resources to coordinate, new formats to build, reflexivity to learn from our successes and our mistakes in view of the next crises. The World Pandemic Research Network (WPRN) will contribute to these needs.

The World Pandemic Research Network (WPRN), the first real-time directory of research and research resources spread over the 5 continents, is an innovation at the service of the international scientific community. It will enable everyone to register their resources (research projects, calls for proposals, surveys, seminars, etc.) but also to know who is doing what and where, and to put the relevant managers in touch with each other.

The www.wprn.org platform automatically provides a time-stamped identification number (WPRN-ID). This makes it possible to cite work in progress, thus accelerating the discovery of resources and collaborations by several months compared to the traditional system of publication in journals. WPRN also allows the sharing of data, questionnaires, hypotheses in real time - while maintaining the system of authorship, tracking and accountability. This process should allow for an acceleration of research and the emergence of new formats for cross-sectoral research.

Reflexive, the WPRN platform mobilizes collective intelligence with a distributed architecture that allows for specialized panels and expert peer moderation, maintaining the best of the scientific tradition of critical and open review, but on an unprecedented global scale. WPRN relies on a network of referees who filter and evaluate projects through a rapid distributed filtering system (spam/resource/especially interesting resource). A new form of expertise crowd-sourcing, combined with discovery aids and resource matching, is expected to significantly accelerate research. This reflexivity will apply not only to projects but also to the processes of this new form of globalized research, the constitution of which WPRN will keep track of and constitute the first up-to-date global directory of the skills and interests of researchers and teams.

Initiated and coordinated by the IEA in Paris with the support of its International Scientific Council, WPRN is supported by more than 100 academic institutions in over 60 countries, as well as by the NETIAS, UBIAS, EASSH, IAU and IPSP networks.