I’m not seeing what’s new here compared to github, figshare, zenodo, overleaf, authorea, etc. Github is actively used for scientific papers and code development. Heck, there are open journals that are based on github for both the paper submission and review process (see Journal of Open Source Software). Figshare and Zenodo are used for artifact hosting and citation. Overleaf and Authorea are used for collaborative editing and publishing to journals and archive sites. Publons exists for tracking peer review activity. All of these have some collaboration with institutions pushing the open science movement forward, be it large research institutions like CERN, non-profits, universities, funding agencies, etc. I don’t see any connection of Researchhub to the open science movement - just some “founders in San Francisco”.
I really don’t see what this adds other than a cryptocurrency component and a leaderboard. I’m not convinced that the missing component in modern science is some form of internet points.
[Disclaimer: I’m a couple decades post-PhD, actively working as a researcher the whole time on all sides : publishing my work, peer reviewing others, and the editorial side helping the whole process work. I am very happy to see progress towards making science work better, but have learned to be super skeptical of startups sniffing opportunities in this space.]
Even if they just rebuilt github, but oriented the UI towards academic publishing and peer review, that would be a potentially valuable product.
The integration of the cryptocurrency certainly has the potential to veer off in scammy directions, but it also has the potential to introduce incentive design mechanisms to solve some of the issues plaguing academic research at the moment. E.g. incentivizing replication.
Reddit started allowing its users send cryptocurrency to each other recently as well, through "community coins." ResearchHub's model isn't that different.
The missing component is the openness more than anything. That and having a central space to go for research. I agree that the crypto attached to this is really weird, and the fact that it seems to be a for-profit is less than ideal.
But the idea of a Github or Stackoverflow for research that uses technology to crowdsource and mediate the review process (both pre and post publish) and then makes that process (at least the post publish part) open and available for the public to see has a ton of merit and potential value.
I grew up in academia. My parents are both academics, as are my god parents. But for any number of reasons I chose not to go into academia. I used to scoff at the whole idea of an ivory tower when I was on the inside, but having spent a decade and a half on the outside I now understand.
Science is completely walled off from the public. It's happening in institutions that charge more than a house for access, and published in a massive constellation of journals which charge $15 to $30 per paper, or hundreds to thousands of dollars per year for full access.
When you take the cost of a single paper, the fact that papers on any particular topic are often spread across a myriad of journals, and consider the fact that science works in the aggregate then add in the media's dismal scientific reporting track record and is it any wonder we have a crisis of scientific understanding and trust? Once you leave academia, your access to the truths it produces is completely cut off.
We need to find a way to break the journal system. The things they provide to the scientific community - editorial assistance, review, and reputation - really ought to be easily replaced by crowdsourcing and software. We just need to build that software and then convince the scientific community to use it.
The benefits to science and society could be massive, because a public that understands and trusts science means a public more willing to fund science, and a society that has a way to agree upon what is and isn't true.
aRxiv / bioaRxiv / medaRxiv exist, are free and are backed by extremely well known names and institutions in the scientific community. They do not require some random coin, you can just, well, upload a preprint of your work.
They also did the hard work on making sure journals will accept papers uploaded to there.
Maybe they don't have a flashy website but I would much much rather use those than upload my work - which I have invested years of my time + thousands or millions of dollars in - to some random site with founders who are just "from San Francisco".
For those trying to "accelerate science" - please try to take even a modicum of time to understand how science is even being done currently and start from there, instead of making up solutions to problems that don't exist.
> For those trying to "accelerate science" - please try to take even a modicum of time to understand how science is even being done currently and start from there, instead of making up solutions to problems that don't exist.
:%s/science/industry/g
So many of these cryptocurrency-based “solutions” could have this same comment aimed at them. So much time/effort/money spent rolling out web services that don’t even understand the basics of the industry they’re trying to “disrupt”.
I’m not anti-cryptocurrency at all (and have my spread that I support) but this “take x and add a token to motivate people to post x to our site” is getting pretty old.
> aRxiv / bioaRxiv / medaRxiv exist, are free and are backed by extremely well known names and institutions in the scientific community. They do not require some random coin, you can just, well, upload a preprint of your work
I think your skepticism is warranted, and to be honest, is probably shared by the majority of academic scientists.
To give a little background - I'm the CSO of ResearchHub and I come from scientific background. After college I started a PhD program in molecular biology and I've worked in epigenetics and synthetic biology labs. I ended up dropping out after seeing how difficult it was to achieve success as an early-career scientists. A few random stories:
-A friend of mine was told to leave her PhD program with a masters degree because she was unable to replicate a famous result in her field. Three years after she left, the paper she was told to replicate was retracted.
It turns out that >50+% of research is unable to be replicated, so I'm sure this is not unique to her experience.
-A PhD student in biochemistry lab I rotated through was in his 9th year of the program (normal is 5-7), completely out of funding, sleeping on a friends couch, and paying for his experiments out of pocket just to get the publication he needed to graduate with a degree.
Academia is riddled with perverse bibliometric incentives that encourage researchers to partake in behaviors which hurt the ecosystem as a whole. For example, an article shared on HN a few days ago showed how irreproducible papers are cited 153x more than reproducible papers. This is because more interesting results are more likely to receive citations, but also less likely to replicate.
After I left my graduate program I was admitted to medical school. My institution was fantastic because they got med students into the hospital to interview patients during the first week of classes. Without typing a novel, many of our front-line therapies are surprisingly old and ineffective. The waste caused by a broken incentive structure for academic research is felt within clinical medicine.
You are absolutely right that arXiv, bioRxiv, and MedRxiv are fabulous projects that have pushed the culture of open science forward tremendously. Also, should out Open Science Framework - they are amazing.
While these tools help scholars share their work in the open, we hope that ResearchHub and ResearchCoin will help to fill a grab by creating new incentives that can help to loosen the grip of bibliometrics on a scientist's career prospects and funding decisions.
ResearchCoin was included because it allows our community to create a dynamic system for rewarding open scientific publishing/discussion that can change over time. In addition, the ResearchHub DAO to allows scientists to help govern how rewards are distributed. The admittedly quite lofty goal is to create a democratic and evidence-based incentive structure for science.
While it is possible that the cryptocurrency component will make it easy for some to dismiss ResearchHub, we believe crypto is an elegant solution to address some of the root problems in academia.
I appreciate you sharing your stories. And it seems like you really have the hands-on experience with science and know the major struggles.
Now, when you talk about solutions it gets really fuzzy. There're very specific problems that exist and you need to create a well-defined incentive. As a graduate student in bioinformatics, my main struggle is the source code. People either don't share any at all, or share something you can't possibly run.
> we believe crypto is an elegant solution to address some of the root problems in academia.
So what are the root problems? First off, the code isn't written by the software engineers, but rather by the biologists who learned how to write some R or Python scripts. Even the CS graduates who switched to bioinformatics have no idea how to develop quality software.
Next, the universities often have their own hardware for computation(HPC). When running on HPC, you often use the pre-installed modules. For example, my university's HPC doesn't even allow running Docker. So in order to make my code runnable somewhere else, I need to put in an incredible amount of effort. Would I do it for some crypto? No.
I have some questions about the cryptocurrency component that I could not see addressed on the website.
1. Where does RSC originate? I see that there are 1 billion RSC in existence. Can more be mined? Do you just generate new ones at will? Is this basically a 100% pre-mine of a token?
2. Who owns the RSC that exist? You plan to distribute some proportion of them. Presumably these can be converted to fiat dollars at some point. Supposing they become valuable, can you just sell off the 99% or so that you haven't freely distributed? What keeps the DAO acting in the community's interest?
3. Popularity is a poor indicator to choose to optimize for if you're looking to incentivize high quality. Even if you were able to build a rock-solid system free of bot accounts and manipulation, which is not your current system, the research and summaries receiving the most RSC would likely be clickbaity papers or those which can appeal to the widest audience. Do you have a way to address these issues?
4. What gives RSC a real-world value?
5. How do you ensure the right person is rewarded RSC? If I upload someone else's paper and get a reward, that doesn't seem right. Especially if a few months down the road they wanted to upload the paper themselves to profit in RSC from it. But presumably you would discourage duplicates, so they couldn't re-upload even if they tried. Similarly, how would incentives be structured for collaborative research? 3+ authors to a paper is not uncommon. It seems like the current system is just to reward the uploader, whoever they may be, like earning a "finder's fee". But then you just end up rewarding whoever can scrape and upload papers the fastest rather than those who put in the work to produce quality research.
I welcome the idea of a community built around open and accessible scientific research. But when you add financial incentives, especially when they're this easy to game and with a cryptocurrency entirely controlled by some opaque entity it raises some major red flags. Hope you have the time to answer some of the above.
Thanks for all of these questions. I hope my answers are able to help. If you'd like - it would be great to connect to have a more in-depth conversation at some point. Feel free to reach out to hello@researchhub.com if want to chat!
1. Yes, RSC is 100% pre-mined and earmarked for distribution to the community, team, founders, and ResearchHub corporate entity. We plan to distribute about 5-6% of the total RSC supply per year to the community as rewards for posting science on the platform.
2. In the future, if we run out of RSC and need to add to the total supply the ResearchHub DAO will be able to vote to mint new tokens. There are two mechanisms at play that keep the DAO honest:
* An open source codebase - If the ResearchHub team ever goes rogue and fails to act as stewards of the community, the community will be able to fork our codebase and manage a new version of ResearchHub how they see fit. See the Steem vs. Hive example to see how open-sourcing can give community an option to exit: https://hackernoon.com/inside-trons-steem-takeover-attempt-a...
* RSC holding represent ownership in the DAO. For every coin held, an individual wallet gets one vote. This means that the biggest hodlers of RSC will have the most influence.
On the surface the concept of more coins = more influence might seem like a bad idea, but we believe that carefully distributing RSC into the hands of the scientists and community members who care the most about our mission will result in the best governance.
Regarding guarantees against the team dumping tokens - we currently have vesting smart contracts for employee token grants and would be open to enacting other measures to ensure a healthy market for RSC if requested by the community.
3. I wrote a little bit about this in another response. Let me copy and paste here:
The way coins are awarded to posts can change over time via a democratic process facilitated by a DAO. In theory, this could create the infrastructure for the scientific community to self-govern how their work is assessed and rewarded.
Perhaps a 1-10 peer review rating would provide a better signal than upvotes? Or maybe basic research deserves 1.5x rewards because it helps to fertilize the landscape of translational research. If the community wants to make changes to Researchhub's incentives, we will be able to iterate over time until we find a formula that properly encourages the behaviors that benefit science the most.
4. As of today RSC gives its holdlers the ability to vote in the ResearchHub DAO and participate in the governance of the network. Within ResearchHub you can tip users for their posts by "supporting" their content with RSC.
5. We’re currently building out a feature to help address this. Any scientist who has authored a paper shared within Researchhub will have a pot of RSC waiting for them upon sign up. It is in our best interest to properly credit reward the authors of manuscripts because in an ideal world they would have a larger influence in the ResearchHub DAO compared to the person who simply posted a link to their paper in our forum.
> Thanks for all of these questions. I hope my answers are able to help.
"While it is possible that the cryptocurrency component will make it easy for some to dismiss ResearchHub, we believe crypto is an elegant solution to address some of the root problems in academia."
so
"let me answer or non-answer these questions in multiple separate responses instead on the website I'm running that is definitely not a scam"
> ResearchCoin was included because it allows our community to create a dynamic system for rewarding open scientific publishing/discussion that can change over time. In addition, the ResearchHub DAO to allows scientists to help govern how rewards are distributed. The admittedly quite lofty goal is to create a democratic and evidence-based incentive structure for science.
I really don't understand how it helps research, can you please elaborate.
Do you mean researchers get paid in a coin, which they can sell, which will fund further research? If the coins became super valuable wouldn't this simply do the opposite: incentivize cheap/easy papers about popular/meme subjects in order to get upvotes?
The way coins are awarded to posts can change over time via a democratic process facilitated by a DAO. In theory, this could create the infrastructure for the scientific community to self-govern how their work is assessed and rewarded.
Perhaps a 1-10 peer review rating would provide a better signal than upvotes? Or maybe basic research deserves 1.5x rewards because it helps to fertilize the landscape of translational research.
If the community wants to make changes to Researchhub's incentives, we will be able to iterate over time until we find a formula that properly encourages the behaviors that benefit science the most.
To speak to your example - if the v1 incentive structure encourages cheap/easy/meme science, we would be able to recognize this and make improvements to hopefully achieve better results.
This is an improvement over the current static system which values bibliometrics because it has the ability to adapt and improve over time.
> for the scientific community to self-govern how their work is assessed and rewarded.
Doesn't this already happen? Science chose bibliometrics as its God. Making a new God out of crypto and crowdsourcing doesn't feel like it addresses the root concern, which is human bias in the scientific method. It sounds like the system you're divising is just a new way for humans to bungle things with bias (no offense intended). I think you're on to something with trying to develop a new method, but perhaps we should figure out how to remove the bias before involving money and human heuristics?
Hi joyecesticks, if I could make one suggestion: if you list the DOI in the metadata of an article page (e.g. by sticking something like `<meta name="citation_doi" content="10.1101/2021.05.24.445440">` in the `<head>`) you'll make it easier for search engines like Google Scholar to find them and associate them with other versions of the article.
Additionally, it allows tools like https://plaudit.pub to add functionality like allowing people with a browser extension to endorse the articles. (Disclosure: I volunteer for Plaudit - hit me up if you want to integrate it into ResearchHub natively!)
Let’s assume ResearchCoin takes off as a new way to assess academic output, and it will become a factor for tenure committees.
The stakes are extremely high in the academic job market, competition is fierce and all incumbents are highly skilled and tremendously resourceful.
Are you prepared to maintain the integrity of ResearchCoin against all sorts of attempts to gamble the system, or even adversarial attacks by those whose careers depend on it?
> While it is possible that the cryptocurrency component will make it easy for some to dismiss ResearchHub, we believe crypto is an elegant solution to address some of the root problems in academia.
And this is where you list the root problems in academia and show how yet another virtual token solves them, and this helps people to see its value, and not dismiss it easily.
Oh, wait. You don't. Not here, not on your website. I mean, you do mention that "Further details about ResearchCoin can also be found on the ResearchHub Notion page.", but don't even link to that page.
Well I think it’s fine to try new models, what’s the harm? I also applaud attempts to use cryptocurrency for something useful.
Academia is quite thoroughly broken, everyone in it hates it. The reality is with the existing publishing model you do upload your precious work to some random site. There it is judged by faceless editors, and sold for profit if they deign to publish it, after you have done professional level editing and graphic design for free. And you do this only because of a consensual hallucination that this is not only essential but the true measure of one’s worth as a scientist.
* Does it have community contributions to projects?
* Does it let people open issues on projects?
After clicking around for a bit, I'm not sure what parallels can be drawn between this site and github. Almost none of the core features of GitHub exist here. The site seems to be a PDF file upload site with a comment section.
>I think it means that the site is an attempt to centralize something that is currently decentralized
with that definition, almost half the internet would be "GitHub for...". at some point, you have to realize that it's just marketing BS and they have almost nothing in common with it.
My name's Pat and I'm on the ResearchHub team. Thanks for taking a look at our site and sharing these questions.
"Github for science" is a phrase that describes our long term vision for what ResearchHub can become.
As a poster below mentioned, today's product could be much better described as Reddit for science. It is a v1 designed to test a few hypotheses and bootstrap a community of early adopters who believe in our mission of open scientific communication.
Overtime we plan to add more Github-esque (for lack of a better word) features. Next in the pipeline is a science-specific collaborative text editor that will help teams of scientists publish any kind of research output directly to ResearchHub.
We are still in very early days and have not yet found product market fit. The more critical thinkers we have the better, so if you have any interest in helping us improve ResearchHub I can share a link to our community slack channel.
Before you try to “fix” science like this, I would highly recommend walking through your idea with people at an open science conference like RDA Alliance or FORCE11 to get their input.
Before my company was acquired (https://assembl.net) I was building something quite similar. I went to many such conferences to meet with my “target demographic,” and I found many of my preconceptions about the future of open science were quite incorrect. I think I attended more than 10 other conferences, and I always found that the problems that needed to be solved were more social and legal than technological (though technology played a crucial role in glueing these pieces together).
I also know many people who tried to do something like what you’re doing. For example, I went through the CV Labs incubator with the guys at https://orvium.io.
The deeper problems, I’ve found, are much less “sexy” because they’re not as technological. The fixes need to come in the form of improved licensing models, better publication of pre-publication results, etc. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these problems, so I’d be interested to talk and hear where you’re at. If you’d like some sober counsel I’d be glad to provide it.
Thank you for your clarifications. I am still a bit confused by the "need" of having a cryptocurrency built into this tool, especially at such an early stage, and as cryptos are getting more fame of financial speculation and less of actual means of payment.
Science can't work if unpopular and controversial results are not given fair consideration. By all means, bad methodologies and conclusions that do not follow from the premises should be picked to pieces, but we can do without downvote campaigns and snarky "Big yikes, sweaty, don't you know that has been debunked already?" comments.
true and it seems like a similar scraped-abtract, someone-needs-to upload-the-pdf-so-we-don't-get-blamed model that you see on researchGate and academia.edu
My guess is they are drawing parallels with it being open to submissions, sharing and reviews(discussion). Prolly not the source control part of it. Though that would be a good feature to have.
That would make almost every website the "Github of X" since submissions, sharing and comments are core features of many websites. Is HN "the github of cynicism"?
Science definitely needs someone to build an obscure economy with cryptocoins and a system weaker than peer review at verifying truth. That system definitely needs to be modeled using some simple comments + up/down voting interface, similar to social media which has been used for propagating fake news for the better part of the past 3 decades.
This is a project which at face value wants a piece of the pie in the publishing market, not something to improve the quality and funding of the scientific community.
As a scientist, I would like to know this project doesn't exist.
> To help bring this nascent community together and incentivize contribution to the platform, a newly created ERC20 token, ResearchCoin (RSC), has been created. Users receive RSC for uploading new content to the platform, as well as for summarizing and discussion research. Rewards for contributions are proportionate to how valuable the community perceives the actions to be - as measured by upvotes.
What academic research needs is fewer for-profit middlemen, not more, or different ones. Without incentives clearly laid out I wouldn’t contribute to another potential rent seeker looking for a de facto monopoly. The coin and the fact that Coinbase CEO is involved (the “who created this site” is very vague, but it links to a blog post by Brian Armstrong which also links back) are big red flags to me. Sorry if this sounds like a shallow dismissal.
To help bring this nascent community together and incentivize contribution to the platform, a newly created ERC20 token, ResearchCoin (RSC), has been created. Users receive RSC for uploading new content to the platform, as well as for summarizing and discussion research. Rewards for contributions are proportionate to how valuable the community perceives the actions to be - as measured by upvotes.
This reminds me of the "cofounder dating" platforms. Yeah, you could go there and talk to people. But how many companies were founded that way?
The research is built on personal relationships and trust. If you work on a niche problem, you already know everyone else who works in the field. You don't really need some crypto-coin to build a reputation, that's what citations are for.
I wish they'd explain up front exactly how this makes journals obsolete. I also wonder if there are any safeguards against this turning into yet another rent-seeking journal.
And I don't think it requires a service, and certainly not a Silicon Valley startup. Labs can just put their papers up on their web sites, and make hyperlinks to those they cite, review or otherwise use in their work. Wasn't that the whole point of the web in the first place?
Semantic web can be used to make the metadata machine readable, and PGP signatures can authenticate the peer reviews. These crusty old technologies are perfect for the task because it's the same crusty old researchers that came up with them that are going to use them.
Interesting... Is this a google thing? Or is that just a single signin making me think so? Who pays for it? Will it be canceled? The problem with voting is that it is a pretty weak guarantee for scientific rigor, perhaps somehow qualified voters fixes this somewhat - peer review has its own issues of course, but seeing the reasoning behind a “vote” helps improve the research in my experience
I like this new UI which feels more updated and better organised in some details. I also like the idea of comments for a paper specially if the comments will be moderated (I suggest to take a look at how HN keeps the conversation valuable) and specially if the authors of the paper will engage there. Maybe you should plan to mark their responses in a visible way as maybe an answer will contribute with some context to understanding a paper.
I followed on Twitter multiple debates between paper authors and their peers, most of them very valuable and I feel that they outcome of those conversations are somehow lost in the Twitter stream, not easy reachable and for sure when someone will read that paper will not find those conversations.
One feedback I have is that I don't think science should be voted or the results be presented based on some kind of popularity.
The results of science sometimes gives us an answer we don't like or don't want. But that does not make it (the answer) less valuable or less true.
There's a flagged comment about the page breaking firefox with uBlock Origin on. Same happened to me. Page did about 500 requests in a couple seconds, then entire browser hangs. Needed to restart. (This is downvoted for some reason, but leaving as feedback for site creators. Not endorsing the flagged comment)
The site uses google for logins so I assume it just bugs out when the request fails. The whole site seemed pretty fragile and unresponsive even while working. Spinners everywhere and often the spinners would go away and there is still no content left on the page.
How it differs from ResearchGate and Academia.edu (both launched in 2008) meant as hubs for scientists where you can upload anything you want and both have comment section for each of the uploads?
Trying to load https://www.researchhub.com/hubs with Google domains disabled in uMatrix causes it to go into some infinite loop of constantly trying to reload everything until my Firefox uses 100% CPU and never loads :(
Science itself is already decentralized. Tons of universities charting their own path. Inventivizing reproducability has nothing to do with decentralization. Those things are orthogonal.
Anyone can technically start their own journal as well. The only thing that has to happen is for the journal to gain the trust of the scientific community over time (which, again, is mostly decentralized). Anyone can build a university. All it has to do is to build trust.
No coin or website will make that more decentralized.
> This specification describes SciFed, a standard for federation of scientific activities and content using ActivityPub. It is intended to be used in the context of the Activity Vocabulary and provides a vocabulary for activity types needed in the context of scientific exchanges.
> Is there any incentive for reproduction of experiments?
There're several incentives to make your research as obscure and unreproducible as possible. First, you want to keep most of the details private to your lab. Why would you help other labs? So that they can make a discovery before you? No way!
Next, suppose it was easy to re-run your whole data analysis pipeline outside your lab. So there's someone you don't even know who tries it, and finds and tiny bug in your code that invalidates your results. Now you have to publish a correction, or even retract. You don't want that happening ever. So you publish some undocumented and unrunnable code so that nobody would even bother reproducing.
I have dreamed of something like this for years. Except I gave it a cutesy name ( Peer Review) and I would have framed it as a combination of GitHub and Stack overflow intended to blow open scientific publishing and replace the journals by doing with simple software and crowdsourcing what they charge an arm, a leg, and a paywall for.
Basically, if you provide a software mediated review system (both pre and post publish) and a reputation system, you can effectively replace most of what the journals provide. The hard part is getting the systematic buy in. If you can get that buy in though, the benefits would be huge.
Imagine being able to solve the file drawer problem by incentivizing all publishing, not just novel publishing. Imagine being able to automate literature reviews with NLP and some machine learning. Imagine wanting to know what the scientific consensus was on any given topic and being able to go to a website where you can ask a question, get the literature review in answer, and then click through to individual papers in order to read the papers, their reviews, and the questions of the public answered by researchers. Imagine what that could do for world wide scientific understanding an acceptance - to have it all happening in the open, no longer mediated by a media incapable of good science reporting.
I love anything that tries to make things easier for scientists, but this… this feels like a solution in search of a problem.
The about page is confusing. It sounds like it is trying to be researchgate, but the title says github for science; there is nothing on there about being for code!
Man, this is not my field at all but it’s been enlightening reading the comments here. I’ve heard that academia was rife with perverse incentives but YEESH.
It certainly seems like the medical/scientific field could use something like ResearchHub.
Whatever the problems faced by researchers in collaboration, publishing and reproducibility are, I'm pretty sure that adding a cryptocurrency isn't part of the solution.
This is very cool. I think this area is a very good one to apply crypto to. Research is a decentralized coordination problem, and many of the incentive problems involved with replication and evaluation seem amenable to mechanism design oriented solutions.
I want to propose a change to peer review. One of the standard questions answered by the reviewer should be: did the submitter supply all the relevant data and source code to the extent possible?
My name is Patrick and I'm the part of the ResearchHub team. Thank you for taking a look at our site and sharing your thoughts/feedback!
To give a little background - I'm a former PhD student who dropped out and went to medical school after seeing how difficult it was to achieve success as an early-career academic.
We built ResearchHub as a potential solution to what we perceive as the core problem within academia - the bibliometric-based incentive structure.
Job security and research funding flows to the scientists who are the most successful at maximizing their citations. Following Goodhart's law - citations no longer serve their original purpose as a measure for academic quality because they are now a target for behavior. Academia's reliance on bibliometrics unintentionally encourages behaviors that detract from the scientific ecosystem as a whole.
We included a cryptocurrency and corresponding DAO because we believe crypto is an elegant solution which allows a community to democratically manage a malleable incentive structure. To see how this could work in practice, check out Ethereum improvement proposals (https://eips.ethereum.org/). Ethereum is a dynamic incentive structure that aligns the interests of many parties to accomplish a goal. Via EIPs, the Ethereum community is able to improve the protocol overtime in a decentralized fashion.
Today's ResearchHub is a v1 designed to test a few hypotheses and bootstrap a community of early adopters who believe in our mission of open scientific communication.We are still in very early days and have not yet found product market fit - so we are actively seeking feedback from academics and citizen scientists alike to help us refine our feature set.
Once again, we very much appreciate your time and attention. Thank you for digging into our project and sharing your thoughts on what we hope to accomplish with ResearchHub!
If you have any questions about the project, please feel free to comment here or reach out via email to hello@researchHub.com
I really don’t see what this adds other than a cryptocurrency component and a leaderboard. I’m not convinced that the missing component in modern science is some form of internet points.
[Disclaimer: I’m a couple decades post-PhD, actively working as a researcher the whole time on all sides : publishing my work, peer reviewing others, and the editorial side helping the whole process work. I am very happy to see progress towards making science work better, but have learned to be super skeptical of startups sniffing opportunities in this space.]