Increased energy density while cutting marginal costs is a hard problem with significant payoffs. Breakthroughs would unlock new business models and welfare effects from robotics, transportation, disaster relief and feasibility of carbon neutral energy production. However, research in this domain with but a few examples [1] is characterized by proprietary R&D.
On the contrary, we've seen great collective achievements over the last years in a variety of fields:
- gitxiv.org, arxiv.org: Various CS subdomains, math, physics
- gym.openai.org: Reinforcement learning
- www.fold.it: Protein modelling
- sharing of intermediate results
- openness to participation
Are there any open online communities for battery research? If not, what are communities closest to the domain and potentially receptive? Which journals publish work that is ahead or on par with closed R&D?
[1] Tesla's stance on the use of its patents
[2] sci-hub
[3] Franzoni, C., & Sauermann, H. (2014). Crowd science: The organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects. Research Policy, 43(1), 1–20. doi:10.1016/j.respol.2013.07.005