On March 31, 2023, we retired the Projects feature and removed all projects from the site.

This was a difficult decision, and it required a lot of discussion and deliberation. At the end of the day, our goal is to create a better science by empowering researchers to do their best work. That's why it’s important that every feature we build and maintain can enable researchers to be more effective in their jobs. By discontinuing Projects, we’re able to create better features that can help our members more.  

This news may be disappointing to some, especially for those who put lots of time and energy into sharing project updates about their work. We talked with researchers who used Projects a lot to find out how we could support them. We learned they’d like to keep all their project updates for later, so we built a tool that lets collaborators request a copy of their projects and sends them a link to download their data.

What we learned from Projects

Projects were originally designed to help researchers share their work, especially their early stage research, and collaborate with their colleagues. For some, however, it can be difficult to share early work publicly, and researchers are generally not encouraged to within the current scientific landscape. 

Additionally, the project update feature was limited and didn’t serve the needs of many researchers. As a result, most projects didn’t have a lot of updates, which made them less useful than we'd hoped — both for the project's collaborators and for people who wanted to find out about new research in their field.

Although Projects did not work as we intended, we did see a clear interest from researchers in highlighting their recent research and sharing updates with relevant researchers.

What we're working on next

We believe we can take the potential of Projects and make it even better by providing more intuitive ways for researchers to both showcase their work and stay up to date on the latest research in their field. 

This year we plan to release multiple features to make it easy for you to share more updates about your work, discover new research, and engage with other people about the topics that matter most to you.

We're very excited about how we can help researchers like you be more effective and advance your daily work. Stay tuned for more information coming soon! 

‍Want more info about what's happening to Projects? Check out the Help Center.