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In mid-March, as businesses and universities across Europe were shutting down in a bid to slow the COVID-19 pandemic, three longtime friends were talking about how they wished they could do something to combat the disease. The three—animal behavior researchers Daniel Calovi of the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behaviour near Konstanz, Germany, Sara Arganda of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, and Alfonso Pérez-Escudero of the Research Center on Animal Cognition and Center for Integrative Biology in Toulouse—are not infectious disease researchers, but they wished there was some way to deploy their skills to aid research on SARS-CoV-2.
There should, they thought, be some means of matching researchers like them with scientists carrying out COVID-19 studies, even to perform humble tasks such as transcribing data. But a Google search didn’t turn anything up. So eventually, the three decided to set up a volunteer-matching service themselves, ...
