Is there currently a platform to publish the work of current postgraduates projects? More specifically in the UK? By publish I mean to highlight ongoing project work? I have tried to research this but have not found too much on the matter? Would it help with potential collaborations, especially in these uncertain times?

I don't know of any UK wide platform for this. But within universities (and across doctoral training colleges), there may be events for showcasing your research among other postgraduates. For instance, in my uni we have a yearly showcase event for postgraduate work across the faculty. Then we have a few more specific ones within the faculty - for instance on mental health research or on research involving children.

Sure, we have a similar thing here, but there is nothing online or in print that helps to promote ongoing projects? I cant seem to find anything anyway.

Some UK universities and their PhD students participate in 3MT, Three-minute thesis presentations of current projects. It's a UK wide competition, also other countries run it too.

There are links about it on the web.

You can't really "print" or "publish" ongoing projects, if you intend to publish your final work in a journal. If you do that, it could be argued it has already been published elsewhere.

You can highlight your work at conferences, in society member magazines or on a website e.g. your own or things like ResearchGate let you upload information about current projects.

Thanks for the reply, how would publishing in a society member magazine be different though? Would it be possible to develop a platform that is cross-institutions, highlighting current projects perhaps with a short lay summary?

It's normally PhD students writing about support funding they've received from the society to attend a conference or do one or two experiments etc. It's not them talking about their results per se.

I'm not sure of the value of something like you are proposing to be honest. Who would read it? Most people don't take too much notice of PhD student research, or what's online about it (now I'm 2 years post PhD I have a different perspective to when I was a PhD student). Other PhD students might but how would they collaborate? Supervisors have the power and the money. The best way to find collaborators and to get your research out there is to go to a conference and speak to people presenting or who has a poster. Then make something work from there. I've had people approach my PI about my research for a collaboration, and it's because of our papers they've read and meeting us at conferences. It's not because of any minor article I might have written about my work or my online presence - that means nothing without actual papers IMO. It might change in the future but I don't think it has at the moment.

I appreciate your opinions, I was just interested in a tool to both inform and highlight the type of work currently being conducted across the UK, for people like myself who may have just started a PhD or are looking to proceed with postgraduate study.

If you're looking for that, then you can look at any research group in the UK on their university page and look at their publications.

This tells you the work of the research group and thus what a prospective PhD student might be doing. Most of the publications are PhD student work of course. Most of these will be building on other work by the group or working in similar areas using similar techniques. Many groups have their own websites as well with more information.

I see what you mean, having a database would be helpful, but I think it would be out of date very quickly, as many people would make the entry once and then it would be left there.

So I may be stating the obvious by suggesting that some form of monthly magazine highlighting current projects would have little to no appeal to either prospective students or current postgrads (in your opinion)?

I think this is highly subjective. Some students may love it, some may have a passing interest and some may not be interested at all. Like with everything I guess.

I'd say I would have a passing interest. If I see a society magazine, I might flick through it, see who is doing what in my area. In the same way I have googled to find people working in other unis in similar areas to me, or browsed conference abstracts etc.

Having a resource like you're describing may be useful, what I'm saying is, there's already resources out there serving a similar function, so I'm not sure I personally see the benefit.

But if it makes you feel any better, I'm not business minded, I'm risk averse and I prefer the status quo, so I'm probably not the best person to listen to anyway!