Scriptomics

Scriptomics provides comprehensive integration of publication components for a streamlined manuscript writing framework
Scriptomics' real-time editing platform allows for collaborative manuscript writing
Manuscript components stored in the integrations lists can be inserted directly into the manuscript

Inspiration

Scientists spend an average of 14 hours per publication formatting their work. With 2,000,000 papers published every year, this adds up to an inefficiency cost of about $1B and takes away significant time from research and education.

Much of this time is spent emailing word documents back and forth, or trying to integrate information like references or author lists, which increasingly include hundreds of people.

Project management tools like asana or collaborative tools like google drive fail to provide features specific to manuscript writing. And tools geared towards scientists like Benchling or Quartzy are limited in what they integrate and do not provide an intuitive UI for writing manuscripts. Scriptomics aims to combine the best of these different platforms to better support scientists in their work.

What it does

Scriptomics aims to help scientists better manage their projects and their time by delivering real-time collaborative editing combined with integrated components especially designed for manuscript writing.

Our prototype allows users to store information about grants, authors, and references. Each of these are easily accessible when typing out a manuscript and provide a clear overview of project progress and status.

Future components we aim to add include lab materials, protocol templates, as well as provide capabilities for automated abstract, bibliography, and figure caption generation.

How we built it

We prototyped the Scriptomics layout and UI/UX in Figma and built out key features of the webapp using Bootstrap, JavaScript, and React.JS for the frontend and Firebase and Google Cloud Platform for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Developing a real time-collaboration framework, and figuring out how to prototype Scriptomics, since none of us had significant experience with Figma or web app development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to build a scalable, real-time collaboration platform from scratch, and provide a productivity tool for scientists so they can focus on making new discoveries.

What we learned

How to prototype in Figma, as well as how to build webapps with React.JS and Firebase.

What's next for Scriptomics

Lots! We want to integrate additional information such as lab materials, protocol templates, and customized lists. We also want to explore automated processes that could generate bibliographies, abstracts, and figure captions to further speed up manuscript writing.