Why I started building Lanyards

Sky Loop by lofipromt

Every researcher I know* faces the same problems.

You need to be visible—for grants, collaborations, career advancement—but maintaining that visibility feels like a second job.

Your work lives across dozens of platforms: publications on ORCID, citations on Google Scholar, social presence on Twitter or Bluesky, institutional page you can't edit, conference talks that exist somewhere online... the list goes on and on.

Keeping everything current and curated means managing each platform separately, repeatedly inputting in the same info, and battling through many systems, with different (often shitty) interfaces, using different credentials.

Time spent on this is time spent not researching and publishing.

At conferences, people exchange contact details that lead to outdated profile pages or dead links. Hiring committees can't find recent impactful work. You lose control of your 'digital presence' when changing institutions. Infrastructure meant to support your visibility and success is actually a hindrance.

I started building Lanyards because I believe researchers need one place that aggregates all of their ideas, activities and works, so that they're discoverable when opportunities arise.

*I used to work at Morressier, a startup that tried and failed to revolutionise academic publishing, due to mismanagement. In that time, I talked with many researchers constantly about their roles as authors, reviewers and ' citizen scientists `.

Understanding the Researcher's reality

Success for a researcher in 2025 isn't just publishing papers.

It's having those papers discovered, cited, and built upon. It's being findable when a programme committee needs speakers, when journalists need experts, when researchers looking for collaborators and editors looking for reviewers need a specific expertise.

But discovery requires presence, and presence requires maintenance, and that maintenance takes time. Time that most simply don't have.

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The friction is everywhere!

Your published name doesn't match your social media handle.

Work is split across maiden and married names.

Your institutional email changes with each new position and anyway, you forgot the password.

Your ORCID lists papers but not your talks or social links (and who can remember that 16 alphanumeric ID when needed???).

Google Scholar shows citations but not your current projects.

ResearchGate has some preprints but misses your recent work.

Your university profile page with poor SEO is years out of date and you can't fix it.

Conference websites that doesn't work on mobile list your presentations but they're scattered across different domains.

Your Twitter has your thoughts but it's mixed with personal posts about your cat and favourite shows.

LinkedIn shows your positions but treats your Nature paper like a corporate blog post.

There's no single source of truth about the full breadth of your work, and creating one feels impossible when you're already working very long weeks. To me, that's totally unacceptable.

Research, and researchers, are too important for this bullshit!

The Lanyards: The 'link-in-bio' for academia.

The link-in-bio model works because it matches how discovery actually happens online today.

Someone reads your paper, hears your talk, sees your post—and wants to know more. They need one click to your complete professional picture, not a scavenger hunt across platforms.

For researchers, I want to try to solve a fundamental tension: maximise visibility with a minimum of effort.

This isn't about replacing existing academic infrastructure, it's about pulling it all together, finally!

ORCID does institutional verification brilliantly—it's the database of record for publications and grants. But it's built for administrators, not for humans trying to understand who you are and what you're working on now.

Google Scholar tracks citations well but provides no more context about you as a researcher.

LinkedIn treats research like corporate work, with the wrong aesthetic and emphasis for academic discovery.

Twitter might be up to date but feeds make it hard for new visitors to get a picture of your entire career.

I believe what you actually need is very different: a simpler profile that shows your current interests, projects and thoughts, alongside your published work, includes less-formal contributions like conference posters and preprints, and presents you as you want to be seen.

Not a database of entries, but a simple readable and engaging representation of your entire research journey.

What Lanyards does (and will do)

Lanyards is trying to solve one problem: researchers need professional visibility without the maintenance overheads.

The concept is simple. One click to sign up. One customisable page to keep current. One personal memorable link to share.

lanyards.app/yourname

The core functionality is familiar. Basic profile elements work as you'd expect: your name and honorifics, biography, photo, and verified affiliations, all editable with proper academic aesthetic.

The power comes from connected scholarly and social profiles. These aren't just links for browsing. They will also ingest your data through secure integrations.

Connect your ORCID and your publications populate automatically.

Link your Dimensions profile and funding information pipes in.

Add Google Scholar and citations count updates.

Connect ResearchGate for your preprints and datasets.

Beyond automated ingestion, you can add the informal work that matters: videos of conference talks, posters and proceedings, preprints, Twitter threads and blog posts, code repos and more...

Content gets ingested automatically and presented beautifully without endless re-keying. When you publish, it appears. When you give a talk, you add one link. When you change institutions, you update once.

Researchers should enjoy the same powerful tools as social media influencers, but built for you and your needs!

Why should you care?

The practical benefits compound.

At conferences, people scan your QR code from your poster or your phone, and instantly access everything—no business cards, no distracting email follow-ups. Hiring committees see your actual career trajectory. Grant reviewers see your current projects, not what you were doing three institutions ago.

But the real value is time returned. No more Sunday afternoons updating ten different websites. No more pre-deadline panic trying to remember recent talks. No more managing multiple link collections.

When someone wants to know about you and your work, they get a complete, current picture immediately.

Building on Open Infrastructure

I’m using the AT Protocol because I believe it can genuinely shift how scholarly communication works. The problems in the current system are obvious: fragmented platforms, locked-in identities, opaque processes, and researchers who have to surrender control of their work just to participate.

ATProto offers a way out of that.

AT Protocol is a game-changer for scholarly communication and academic publishing. - Marginalia

How to make research more open, continuous, and collaborative, while preserving ownership, credit, and integrity.

With ATProto, your Lanyard lives in your own data repository. You own the record of your publications, reviews, datasets, and connections—not a publisher, not a platform, not an institution. You can move hosts without losing anything. There’s no lock-in, no sudden policy changes, and no paywall creeping between you and your community.

The protocol’s transparency is the point. Its data structures are open and documented, so anyone can verify what’s happening, challenge assumptions, and help improve the system. It shifts power away from proprietary gatekeepers toward a shared, inspectable infrastructure built for people rather than revenue targets.

AT Protocol isn't just technical architecture—it's a philosophical argument that aligns with academic values of transparency, accessibility, and reusability.

Single sign-on with Bluesky means researchers already on the platform can start immediately. But more importantly, it connects a growing network of academics already having scholarly discussions in an open protocol.

As the AT Protocol ecosystem grows, Lanyards can become part of a larger academic infrastructure, not another isolated silo.

Why This Matters Now

Research careers today span multiple institutions and platforms. Work happens in preprints, conferences, and online discussions as much as in journals. Collaboration crosses disciplines and continents.

The infrastructure simply hasn't kept pace.

Lanyards is trying to fill a specific gap: maintain your professional presence without technical skills or significant time investment. Your research identity belongs to you, not your institution or a platform.

The goal is straightforward:

Spend less time managing profiles, more time doing research.

Maintain continuity throughout you career transitions.

Control how you and your work is presented.

Be discoverable when and where opportunities arise.

That's why I'm building Lanyards. To solve a real problem affecting researchers. One link to make your research life easier to share.

Get involved!

🦋 Follow Lanyards on Bluesky

As of today, I'm very close to having a beta version that folks can play with. In the meantime follow along on Bluesky!

Lanyards — for Researchers 🧑‍🚀 (@lanyards.app)

One link to make your research life easier to share! Papers, talks, affiliations, socials, whatever... Easy, free, decentralised. Sign up with Bluesky instantly → (🚧 Coming Soon!) #ATProtocol #ATscience #Decentralized #LinkInBio #ORCID

🚧 Contribute to Code

GitHub - renderghost/lanyards: Lanyards is a dedicated profile for researchers, built on the AT Protocol

Lanyards is a dedicated profile for researchers, built on the AT Protocol - renderghost/lanyards

📣 Connect with Me

B. Prendergast 👋 (@renderg.host)

💖 Makes things make sense 🤔 Writes about science, tech, people, products & the messy in-betweens 🌿 Designs to ease your org's growing pains 🐳 Specialises in product strategy and design for complex systems ☮️ Posts are IMHO ⧉ https://links.renderg.host