# About us

> Mysteries Department is an open research platform for the world's unsolved mysteries, studied in the open with shared sources, data and methods.

Source: https://mysteriesdept.com/about  
Publisher: Mysteries Department  
Licence: CC BY 4.0 (credit Mysteries Department and link the page)  

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Mysteries Department is an open research platform for the world's unsolved mysteries. We want every one of them studied in the open, with the sources, data and tools to test any idea about it.

Old mysteries tend to attract confident answers and very few tests. A book no one can read gets a new “solution” every year; each one starts from scratch, uses its own transcription, and is judged by how convincing it sounds. We think they'd move faster if the groundwork were shared: one set of sources, datasets anyone can download, methods anyone can rerun, and a public record of what has already failed.

## How it works

**Mystery** An article on what's known, with every claim sourced.

**Questions** The mystery split into things evidence could settle.

**Answers** Anyone in the beta can propose one.

**Tests** Methods run on shared datasets, with controls.

**Review** Two people check a result before it counts.

An answer that fails its test is marked ruled out and stays on the site with the reason, so nobody has to test it again. Findings that change an answer are written up in [News](https://mysteriesdept.com/news).

## What we hold ourselves to

**Show the source** Every statement in an article points to where it came from.

**Test on what you didn't fit** A reading has to work on pages it wasn't built from.

**Keep the failures** Ruled-out answers stay visible, with the evidence against them.

**Open by default** Text, data and code are free to reuse. See [Terms and licences](https://mysteriesdept.com/terms).

## Who runs it

**[apollo](https://mysteriesdept.com/u/apollo)** Founder and editor. Leads the Voynich research and wrote Reading Without a Key.

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**Editors wanted** We're looking for editors for the other mysteries. [Get in touch](https://mysteriesdept.com/standards#contact).

## Get involved

Everything here is free to read. Contributing is by invitation while we're in beta. These are the ways people help:

**Research** Propose answers, run methods on the shared data, and write up what you find.

**Review** Check other people's results before they go live. Reviewers are credited by name.

**Add sources** Papers, archive records, images and transcriptions, with where they came from.

**Build methods** Write or improve analysis modules. Each method is versioned and credited to its authors.

**Bring a mystery** Know one well? Help us set it up: the article, the first questions and the sources.

**Follow along** Subscribe to [News by RSS](https://mysteriesdept.com/news.xml), or follow a mystery to hear when its answers change.

[Request access](https://mysteriesdept.com/request-access)[Contact us](https://mysteriesdept.com/standards#contact)