53 ms·

Researchhub: GitHub for Science

182 points by vimy 5y ago

SilverRed 5y ago
What does "GitHub for Science" even mean? * Does it use git? * Does it have any version control? * 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.
- samename 5y ago
  You also can’t publish original papers there - they have to be public somewhere else first. Also, GitHub doesn’t have a coin system.
  - stevejpurves 5y ago
    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
- push7joshi 5y ago
  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.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    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"?
- surround 5y ago
  It looks a lot more like "reddit for science." There's voting, comments, subreddits (hubs), and /all.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    And ~doge~ research coin! I'm not sure I understand this.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Yes I find the best science is debated and evaluated with an up and down arrow. And double extra bonus points if you can hide other people’s work from view if you don’t agree with it!
  - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    That to me is the scariest thing of all. 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. Edit: thanks for the ResearchCoin, kind stranger!
- joycesticks 5y ago
  Hi there, 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. Thanks again for your interest in our project!
  - sebmellen 5y ago
    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 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 https://orvium.io. Now I’m working on https://intpub.org https://intpub.org and https://liras.org https://liras.org. 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.
  - cunidev 5y ago
    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.
- Ankaios 5y ago
  What does "GitHub for Science" even mean? Personally, I think it means that the site is an attempt to centralize something that is currently decentralized.
  - max46 5y ago
    >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.
rand0mx1 5y ago
blocking google.com with adblocker will make website unresponsive.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  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.
dbingham 5y ago
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 really hope this gets traction.
moelf 5y ago
I sure hope science doesn't solely depend on google sign in.... /s
telemetrwhy 5y ago
This website breaks my mozilla firefox browser with ublock origin. Do not want. Products will not solve what laws are required to solve. Without state mandate for all scientific literature to be published publicly we will constantly be at war with publishers and other entities who want to be the "modern Pythagoras secret society" or AT&T/IBM/RAND for access to the special sauce.
teruakohatu 5y ago
> 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. Can you imagine how well this will turn out?
dannykwells 5y ago
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.
- sen 5y ago
  > 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.
- joycesticks 5y ago
  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.
wwwtyro 5y ago
I'd love to see science become more decentralized. Is there any incentive for reproduction of experiments?
- laserbeam 5y ago
  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.
- rapnie 5y ago
  I just found this: https://synalp.frama.io/olki/scifed/ https://synalp.frama.io/olki/scifed/ > 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. It is from 2019, and probably from the OLKi project: https://framagit.org/synalp/olki/olki https://framagit.org/synalp/olki/olki Don't know if it is still active, but the idea to use the Fediverse for Open Science interop is appealing.
- f6v 5y ago
  > 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.
oefrha 5y ago
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.
gls2ro 5y ago
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.
rapnie 5y ago
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)
- dmitriid 5y ago
  It hangs for me, too, in Safari with AdGuard. Chrome with no adblocker shows that it does 111 requests loading 5.6 MB of resources for the about page. 5 of those are Javascript.
JeremyBanks 5y ago
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 is a terrible idea and you should feel bad.
- f6v 5y ago
  > Rewards for contributions are proportionate to how valuable the community perceives the actions to be - as measured by upvotes. > This is a terrible idea and you should feel bad. Especially considering this is exactly how science works now. You publish, get a ton of citations, and get bigger grants.
laserbeam 5y ago
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.
hvocode 5y ago
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.]
- onlyforthat 5y ago
  having internet points as a motivation could be worst possible thing. See reddit for example
  - fsflover 5y ago
    What about the Hacker News?
    - the-dude 5y ago
      Hacker News does not display the karma of comments, only to the owner.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        But it sorts the comments based on karma.
joycesticks 5y ago
Hey everybody, 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/ 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
- brylie 5y ago
  Please ensure text is readable (color contrast wise) by following WCAG recommendations: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
- telemetrwhy 5y ago
  Keep up the good work. Ignore the haters.
nxpnsv 5y ago
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
samch93 5y ago
Reminds me of the open science framework (https://osf.io/ https://osf.io/), which is widely used by researchers from social sciences / psychology.
- question000 5y ago
  Wow this is amazing, and it's Open Source and free!
rollulus 5y ago
I guess the name "Sci-Hub" was already taken.
darawk 5y ago
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 look forward to seeing how this evolves.
lcrz 5y ago
Pretty sure this is trademark infringement.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  How so? Is there a serious risk people will go to their site by mistake and think they are actually using GitHub?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
f6v 5y ago
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.
revskill 5y ago
Nice to see React, react-router, redux in action.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  The about page alone does 111 requests and loads 5MB of javascript. There's literally nothing on the entire site that requires any of this. These are mostly static pages with static text.
periheli0n 5y ago
Researcher reputation is determined by up- and downvotes? This will be carnage in a competitive research field. Source: 20 years experience in competitive research areas.
- detaro 5y ago
  The more people your lab has, the more power it has, as it should be! /s
RootKitBeerCat 5y ago
Research Coin, puke...
Hard_Space 5y ago
Making Google authentication the sole sign-in option reduced my curiosity from 'moderate' to 'zero'.
rorygreig 5y ago
Looks like the idea for this was based on a medium post by Brian Armstrong: https://medium.com/@barmstrong/ideas-on-how-to-improve-scientific-research-9e2e56474132 https://medium.com/@barmstrong/ideas-on-how-to-improve-scien...
forgotpwd16 5y ago
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?
- fakedang 5y ago
  rEsEarCh CoiN
amelius 5y ago
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?
tmsbrg 5y ago
Trying to load https://www.researchhub.com/hubs 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 :(
beowulfey 5y ago
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!
sivizius 5y ago
Someone reinvented ResearchGate and aRxiv, but made it worse?
monkey_monkey 5y ago
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.
Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
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.
NetOpWibby 5y ago
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.
crumbshot 5y ago
An upload site for papers, but with a cryptocurrency scam attached. Useless.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

182 points by vimy 5y ago

What does "GitHub for Science" even mean? * Does it use git? * Does it have any version control? * 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.

samename 5y ago
You also can’t publish original papers there - they have to be public somewhere else first. Also, GitHub doesn’t have a coin system.
- stevejpurves 5y ago
  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
push7joshi 5y ago
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.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  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"?
surround 5y ago
It looks a lot more like "reddit for science." There's voting, comments, subreddits (hubs), and /all.
- tomrod 5y ago
  And ~doge~ research coin! I'm not sure I understand this.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  Yes I find the best science is debated and evaluated with an up and down arrow. And double extra bonus points if you can hide other people’s work from view if you don’t agree with it!
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  That to me is the scariest thing of all. 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. Edit: thanks for the ResearchCoin, kind stranger!
joycesticks 5y ago
Hi there, 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. Thanks again for your interest in our project!
- sebmellen 5y ago
  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 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 https://orvium.io. Now I’m working on https://intpub.org https://intpub.org and https://liras.org https://liras.org. 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.
- cunidev 5y ago
  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.
Ankaios 5y ago
What does "GitHub for Science" even mean? Personally, I think it means that the site is an attempt to centralize something that is currently decentralized.
- max46 5y ago
  >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.

rand0mx1 5y ago

blocking google.com with adblocker will make website unresponsive.

SilverRed 5y ago
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.

dbingham 5y ago

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 really hope this gets traction.

moelf 5y ago

I sure hope science doesn't solely depend on google sign in.... /s

telemetrwhy 5y ago

This website breaks my mozilla firefox browser with ublock origin. Do not want. Products will not solve what laws are required to solve. Without state mandate for all scientific literature to be published publicly we will constantly be at war with publishers and other entities who want to be the "modern Pythagoras secret society" or AT&T/IBM/RAND for access to the special sauce.

teruakohatu 5y ago

> 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. Can you imagine how well this will turn out?

dannykwells 5y ago

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.

sen 5y ago
> 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.
joycesticks 5y ago
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.

wwwtyro 5y ago

I'd love to see science become more decentralized. Is there any incentive for reproduction of experiments?

laserbeam 5y ago
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.
rapnie 5y ago
I just found this: https://synalp.frama.io/olki/scifed/ https://synalp.frama.io/olki/scifed/ > 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. It is from 2019, and probably from the OLKi project: https://framagit.org/synalp/olki/olki https://framagit.org/synalp/olki/olki Don't know if it is still active, but the idea to use the Fediverse for Open Science interop is appealing.
f6v 5y ago
> 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.

oefrha 5y ago

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.

gls2ro 5y ago

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.

rapnie 5y ago

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)

dmitriid 5y ago
It hangs for me, too, in Safari with AdGuard. Chrome with no adblocker shows that it does 111 requests loading 5.6 MB of resources for the about page. 5 of those are Javascript.

JeremyBanks 5y ago

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 is a terrible idea and you should feel bad.

f6v 5y ago
> Rewards for contributions are proportionate to how valuable the community perceives the actions to be - as measured by upvotes. > This is a terrible idea and you should feel bad. Especially considering this is exactly how science works now. You publish, get a ton of citations, and get bigger grants.

laserbeam 5y ago

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.

hvocode 5y ago

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.]

onlyforthat 5y ago
having internet points as a motivation could be worst possible thing. See reddit for example
- fsflover 5y ago
  What about the Hacker News?
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Hacker News does not display the karma of comments, only to the owner.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      But it sorts the comments based on karma.

joycesticks 5y ago

Hey everybody, 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/ 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

brylie 5y ago
Please ensure text is readable (color contrast wise) by following WCAG recommendations: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
telemetrwhy 5y ago
Keep up the good work. Ignore the haters.

nxpnsv 5y ago

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

samch93 5y ago

Reminds me of the open science framework (https://osf.io/ https://osf.io/), which is widely used by researchers from social sciences / psychology.

question000 5y ago
Wow this is amazing, and it's Open Source and free!

rollulus 5y ago

I guess the name "Sci-Hub" was already taken.

darawk 5y ago

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 look forward to seeing how this evolves.

lcrz 5y ago

Pretty sure this is trademark infringement.

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
How so? Is there a serious risk people will go to their site by mistake and think they are actually using GitHub?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

f6v 5y ago

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.

revskill 5y ago

Nice to see React, react-router, redux in action.

dmitriid 5y ago
The about page alone does 111 requests and loads 5MB of javascript. There's literally nothing on the entire site that requires any of this. These are mostly static pages with static text.

periheli0n 5y ago

Researcher reputation is determined by up- and downvotes? This will be carnage in a competitive research field. Source: 20 years experience in competitive research areas.

detaro 5y ago
The more people your lab has, the more power it has, as it should be! /s

RootKitBeerCat 5y ago

Research Coin, puke...

Hard_Space 5y ago

Making Google authentication the sole sign-in option reduced my curiosity from 'moderate' to 'zero'.

rorygreig 5y ago

Looks like the idea for this was based on a medium post by Brian Armstrong: https://medium.com/@barmstrong/ideas-on-how-to-improve-scientific-research-9e2e56474132 https://medium.com/@barmstrong/ideas-on-how-to-improve-scien...

forgotpwd16 5y ago

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?

fakedang 5y ago
rEsEarCh CoiN

amelius 5y ago

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?

tmsbrg 5y ago

Trying to load https://www.researchhub.com/hubs 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 :(

beowulfey 5y ago

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!

sivizius 5y ago

Someone reinvented ResearchGate and aRxiv, but made it worse?

monkey_monkey 5y ago

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.

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago

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.

NetOpWibby 5y ago

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.

crumbshot 5y ago

An upload site for papers, but with a cryptocurrency scam attached. Useless.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]