01
Research
Not just the papers, but the questions asked, the methods chosen, and the reasoning that connected them over a career.
A public archive of scientific life
A scientific life is more than a profile.
Preserve research, mentorship, discoveries, documents, relationships, and contribution — held together through evidence-backed trust, and kept for the people who come after.
Archival photograph — a laboratory, a notebook, a hand at work
Fig. 001 — the working life, before it becomes a recordPowered by the EquiWork Trust Platform
01 — The problem
The record of a scientific life is thinner, and more fragile, than we like to believe.
A career leaves behind papers with citation counts and a name on a shrinking web of institutional pages. Almost everything else — the reasoning, the correspondence, the students shaped, the ideas abandoned and later vindicated — lives in filing cabinets, inboxes, and memory.
When a scientist retires or dies, that context disperses. Profiles decay, links rot, accounts close. What remains is a summary that no one is accountable for — and no way to ask, quietly, how do we know this is true?
02 — What we preserve
Six dimensions of a working life.
02
Mentorship
The students taught and shaped — a form of contribution that rarely appears in any formal record, yet outlasts most of them.
03
Discoveries
The findings themselves, held with the context that gave them meaning: what was known before, and what changed after.
04
Documents
Notebooks, correspondence, drafts, and data — the working papers where science actually happens, kept in their original form.
05
Relationships
Collaborators, colleagues, and communities. A scientific life is a network, and the network is part of the record.
06
Contribution
The honest account of what a person actually did — described with care, attributed fairly, and open to correction.
03 — How trust works
Trust is built, not computed.
We do not claim to own the truth. We preserve accountable evidence for what may be responsibly said — and we keep the chain that connects a claim back to the document, the dataset, or the person who stands behind it.
Every assertion in a Scientific Legacy Passport carries its provenance. Nothing is asserted that a human has not reviewed.
See how trust is built →01Evidence
02Commitment
03Claim
04Human review
05Assertion
06Scientific Passport
04 — The Scientific Legacy Passport
Not a page. A living record.
A Passport gathers a scientist's identity, timeline, publications, contributions, relationships, institutions, and evidence into one place — and keeps it open, correctable, and accountable over decades rather than frozen into a document.
Browse public Passports →For families
The most important things are often the ones no database ever held.
A scientist's life often contains documents, letters, photographs, memories, and stories that never reach an official record. They live in a family's care.
Scientific Legacy gives families a responsible, private way to preserve them — held apart from the public record, on your terms, and released only if and when you choose. Family archive intake is in development.
Who it's for
One record, held in common.
For researchers
Take responsibility for your own record while you can still speak to it. Decide how your work, your reasoning, and your role are described — and leave a record that will still make sense long after the links have changed.
For families
Preserve a loved one's life and work with dignity. Hold the private letters, photographs, and memories safely, and choose what becomes part of the public record — on your own terms, and in your own time.
For institutions
Give the histories in your care a home that survives your own systems. Archives, departments, and societies can preserve the people who defined them without depending on platforms that will not last.
Discovery workflow
Find source material before anything is asserted.
Signed-in researchers can run discovery cases to gather candidate facts from connected sources. Candidate information remains proposed and under review — not verified truth — until human review completes.
Open discovery dashboard →The Trust Contract
Our commitments are written down, and meant to outlast us.
We do not claim to own truth.
We preserve accountable evidence for what may be responsibly said. The record points to its sources; it does not replace them.
Every assertion carries its provenance.
Nothing is stated in a Passport that cannot be traced back to its evidence and to the human who reviewed it.
The record is correctable.
A life is not fixed the moment it is recorded. Assertions can be revisited, contested, and amended, with the history of changes preserved.
The family's trust is protected.
Private material stays private. What a family shares in confidence is never made public without their explicit, revocable consent.
Early access
Help us build something meant to last.
We are opening Scientific Legacy carefully, to a small number of researchers, families, and institutions. If preserving a scientific life matters to you, we would like to hear from you.
Request accessEmail signup form planned — contact page open now