Cooplit

So much intellectual power is lost in the inefficiency of communication. Within academia, much of this intellectual effort goes into publishing papers that have no guarantee of being read. Over a million papers are published every year, and, busy publishing, when do academics have time to read carefully? We all know we skim.

Academia is due for an update. Think how nice it would be if your academic friends had the same niche interests as you – how much faster could you learn through conversation? Imagine your ideal conference and all the conversations you’d have there, then imagine you know where to go on the internet to find that online. Intellectual discourse happens all the time online. It’s time to take that seriously.

The core ideal of Cooplit is that ideas could get built better if there were better spaces to build them. Academic literature is a starting point—a (presently chaotic) web of people and places that connects us based on our research. We plan to make sense out of this chaos and to build a place where people can find each other based on ideas. One day, you will be able to find and exist in your niche international research subsubsub field, regardless of if there’s a conference for it.