Iris.ai vs COVID-19: a free offer to researchers and citizen scientists during the pandemic

We are a company that do our best to put impact first. Over the last few weeks we have found ourselves initially stunned and perplex, and eventually a tad bit overwhelmed, by the COVID-19 pandemic and the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing it. What can a small startup team do, beyond sharing our advice on remote work (we’ve been remote since the start of the company), do our best to keep our employees safe and sane and stay hopeful that our revenues will not decline entirely to zero?

We can’t do much. But if you are a researcher, medical professional or problem solver, you can. And we can help.

For anyone working on any aspect of research around COVID-19, whether on the epidemiology, virology, biology, psychology or anything else – and whether you are an academic or a concerned citizen – we hereby invite you to join Iris.ai, and your account will then be added to the premium access COVID-19 research group. Our only requirements are that your work is on the current pandemic, and that you allow your findings through Iris.ai to be shared publicly.

Iris.ai puts her engine to the task of COVID-19

Our tools can help you find the right research for the problem you face. Here, for example, is an interesting map on “The epidemiology and pathogenesis of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak”.

The amazing humans at the Allen Institute / Semantic Scholar have worked on an open dataset of almost 30,000 articles related to COVID-19. This, plus about 120 million other research papers (Open Access), are all connected to the Iris.ai tools.

On April 7th, at 8am CET and 5pm CET we will host free webinars for everyone joining the premium COVID-19 research group (register here), to help you get started, answer all your questions, and do anything we can to help your research process run smoothly. Please sign up to get the details.

Everyone is of course also welcome to join our monthly online workshops that walk you through the premium tools, whether or not you’re a COVID-19 researcher. Have a look at our Facebook events for upcoming dates.

In order to get set up with free access to the COVID-19 Iris.ai premium organization, here is what needs to happen:
1. You sign up for an account on https://the.iris.ai/auth/registration
2. Then send an email to order@iris.ai from the same email account and mention COVID-19 in the subject.
3. We will then add you to the premium group, and notify you when it’s done so you can log in, accept the terms and get working.

We will keep this premium access open to you for a minimum of three months – until end of June 2020 – and it will be extended unless the pandemic is over.

We don’t know what each one of us can do on our own, but we know how much power there is in a world coming together against a common enemy. We hope our tools might help you in the process. Let’s see if we can save some lives.

If you are not a researcher, but want to help, you can do so by sharing this announcement with the people in your network who might have a use for it.