6 ms·

A few comments from a practicing scientist 1.) You have a lot of nice tech, but think long and hard about the social dynamics and how you can get from A->B. By

A few comments from a practicing scientist 1.) You have a lot of nice tech, but think long and hard about the social dynamics and how you can get from A->B. By far, the tech will be the easy part. Convincing established scientists and up-and-coming scientists who need publications in quality journals is much, much harder. As another comment says, try finding a niche first and build out. Particularly some less established fields. 2.) You mention hiring engineers, designers, devops, QE. This points to solving a social problem with technology. Consider marketing, or even social scientists who can guide you in understanding the communities you are attempting to influence. Become embedded in those communities, build trust, attend (and maybe sponsor) conferences, and then branch out. 3.) Sort of a pet peeve of mine (among many): You talk about making the studies accessible to the lay public (in terms of understandability). I feel this is a bad trend. Scientists need a way to talk to each other in their own language, without needing to lay out all the context every time. Academic publishing is that avenue. I have published many articles that will not be understandable to anyone without at least 2 years of graduate school in the field. They aren't groundbreaking, but can still be important. Science is very incremental in many areas. Although I 100% agree that it should be open and free. For the lay public, there are always books, blogs, and pop-sci news that put it into context. Anyway, I wish you success (truly, we need improvement over the status quo). It's easy for people to criticize, but think of all the things we don't criticize (which means we approve of them!)

dbingham 4y ago
Thanks for this feedback - it's very helpful! 1) Yep. This I know. The tech is the easy part, by far. Any suggestions on which fields might be most open to this approach, and where to approach them? 2) Good point. At the moment, there is a lot of technical work to do, so that's where my head is. But if we get big enough to where we can afford it, community moderators who can help guide the community towards a collaborative approach and gently nudge back some of the egos I've already been told (many times over) are a problem were already on the list. Social scientists are a great suggestion that I had not thought of. 3) This may be an area where we disagree - at least partially. I understand the need to talk to peers in a mutual language, and I'm not arguing against that. My thought is that this platform could help provide space for translators. Papers and responses would be in the technical language of the field, but I've thought about including a (heavily moderated) peanut gallery below for translators to help the lay public understand the work. One of the issues that has been front and center in the pandemic is that a lot of bad vaccine science was easily accessible to the public, and when it was done intentionally by snake oil salesmen, intentionally made easily understandable. But the good stuff was locked up behind paywalls or hard to understand. There were translators on social media who did their best to answer the concerns but there weren't enough of them. There are a lot of people not currently in academia who have enough of a foundation to tell snake oil from the real deal and who could help translate, with access. Right now, they don't have access. So you wind up with PDFs of "1000 papers showing why vaccines are harmful" getting shared around and no easy way for people adjacent to the communities where they are being shared to counter them. Additionally, science is supposed to be an open process - we're supposed to trust it not because of appeals to authority, but because, in theory, we can replicate the reasoning and experiments that got us to our current understanding. Now, of course, replicating the experiments is mostly impossible for the lay person at this point, but someone who's interested and has the time should be able to follow along. We can't say, in the same breath, "You should trust science, because it's open and you can replicate it" and "Oh, you can't understand this." We need to create space for scientists to talk to each other, and for translators to help the public understand and follow the conversation in real time. We would all benefit from a greater understanding of all aspects of science, and from the increased trust that come with understanding.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Try the field of industrial design engineering / human-centered design / HCI. Huge growth and openness.
gonzo41 4y ago
On your point 3. I don't disagree, I just observe that most disciplines of science use their specific journal writing styles to force a style of writing which is generally more about conforming to the norms of the discipline rather than any other benefit. Stuffy science can't answer this: Why would a youtube video with a DOI not be an acceptable form of publishing. (ignore the archiving issue for the discussion). You don't have to tone down content complexity, you only see that in sci-coms on social media because they are focusing on engagement rather than just using the platforms for their network effect.
- sseagull 4y ago
  > Why would a youtube video with a DOI not be an acceptable form of publishing I can, at least personally. For some stuff video might work, but text has a much higher level of precision and information density than video. When writing an article, I will often edit sections many times until it has the right amount of information, references, and flow. That is much harder in video, and scientists don't know much about video editing as is... Also, when learning something, it typically takes multiple articles. I regularly have 5 articles open on my desk (yes, printed out), where I'm cross referencing equations, methods, etc, with one another. That is much harder to do on a computer, let alone with video. Again, maybe for some fields it makes sense (maybe?). But it's hard to beat ease of use of text. (Also, there's nothing wrong with conforming to a particular style. It's about consistency across authors, which helps the reader. Software projects have style guides, don't they? As well as traditional media outlets. Why shouldn't scientific publications?)
  - idrios 4y ago
    > Also, when learning something, it typically takes multiple articles This is where I think video would be most helpful, actually. To relate it to software, when I'm learning a new language or a new tool, a video helps me navigate and learn my unknowns. But when I'm already an expert on a topic, video is intolerable because it takes too long to get to the point and often doesn't have the information I'm looking for. Likewise for science, a video recording for materials and methods would probably be incredibly helpful for replication purposes. Also review papers might lend themselves better to video format because their purpose is to summarize existing research in a way that's digestible to someone relatively new to the field. It doesn't fit all purposes but it would make the science more accessible
t_mann 4y ago
On the career / publishing perspective: I think you're overlooking the fact that an upload to such a peer-review platform would usually be considered non-archival, so the paper could still be published in a prestigious journal. It's basically a pre-print server with a comment function (which already exists in some sort, btw, researchgate.net), and most journals have accepted that they can't stop people from making their papers available through such channels. The bigger threat to this model is probably places like arXiv/SSRN adding similar functionality, but since this seems to be a non-profit project, it would probably mean mission accomplished.
- dbingham 4y ago
  Someone cribbing our approach would be mission partially accomplished. The idea is to displace the journal system and advance open science and academic publishing. If it accomplishes that goal, mission accomplished. I'll be a little sad if I didn't get to participate, but the whole world of software development awaits and there are other neat projects to work on. If they crib our approach, but execute poorly and don't succeed in opening publishing, that's not mission accomplished, but there's no reason we can't move forward and execute better in that scenario. If they crib the approach and show why it doesn't work, that's also mission accomplished. It shows that this isn't the right solution to the problem. Or maybe we succeed - it remains to be seen. Any of those outcomes - cribbed and failed, cribbed and succeeded, or we fail/succeed in a way that shows whether the concept works clearly - we would consider mission accomplished.
emailtho 4y ago
I don’t disagree that 3 seems valuable, but at the end of the day scientists are just people and should not shield themselves from having to validate and communicate their work given it’s impact on normies. Consider there is still plenty of ways for scientists to communicate undistracted; a site such as this does not mean other forums are obsoleted. Private channels will still exist.

dbingham 4y ago

Thanks for this feedback - it's very helpful! 1) Yep. This I know. The tech is the easy part, by far. Any suggestions on which fields might be most open to this approach, and where to approach them? 2) Good point. At the moment, there is a lot of technical work to do, so that's where my head is. But if we get big enough to where we can afford it, community moderators who can help guide the community towards a collaborative approach and gently nudge back some of the egos I've already been told (many times over) are a problem were already on the list. Social scientists are a great suggestion that I had not thought of. 3) This may be an area where we disagree - at least partially. I understand the need to talk to peers in a mutual language, and I'm not arguing against that. My thought is that this platform could help provide space for translators. Papers and responses would be in the technical language of the field, but I've thought about including a (heavily moderated) peanut gallery below for translators to help the lay public understand the work. One of the issues that has been front and center in the pandemic is that a lot of bad vaccine science was easily accessible to the public, and when it was done intentionally by snake oil salesmen, intentionally made easily understandable. But the good stuff was locked up behind paywalls or hard to understand. There were translators on social media who did their best to answer the concerns but there weren't enough of them. There are a lot of people not currently in academia who have enough of a foundation to tell snake oil from the real deal and who could help translate, with access. Right now, they don't have access. So you wind up with PDFs of "1000 papers showing why vaccines are harmful" getting shared around and no easy way for people adjacent to the communities where they are being shared to counter them. Additionally, science is supposed to be an open process - we're supposed to trust it not because of appeals to authority, but because, in theory, we can replicate the reasoning and experiments that got us to our current understanding. Now, of course, replicating the experiments is mostly impossible for the lay person at this point, but someone who's interested and has the time should be able to follow along. We can't say, in the same breath, "You should trust science, because it's open and you can replicate it" and "Oh, you can't understand this." We need to create space for scientists to talk to each other, and for translators to help the public understand and follow the conversation in real time. We would all benefit from a greater understanding of all aspects of science, and from the increased trust that come with understanding.

dr_dshiv 4y ago
Try the field of industrial design engineering / human-centered design / HCI. Huge growth and openness.

gonzo41 4y ago

On your point 3. I don't disagree, I just observe that most disciplines of science use their specific journal writing styles to force a style of writing which is generally more about conforming to the norms of the discipline rather than any other benefit. Stuffy science can't answer this: Why would a youtube video with a DOI not be an acceptable form of publishing. (ignore the archiving issue for the discussion). You don't have to tone down content complexity, you only see that in sci-coms on social media because they are focusing on engagement rather than just using the platforms for their network effect.

sseagull 4y ago
> Why would a youtube video with a DOI not be an acceptable form of publishing I can, at least personally. For some stuff video might work, but text has a much higher level of precision and information density than video. When writing an article, I will often edit sections many times until it has the right amount of information, references, and flow. That is much harder in video, and scientists don't know much about video editing as is... Also, when learning something, it typically takes multiple articles. I regularly have 5 articles open on my desk (yes, printed out), where I'm cross referencing equations, methods, etc, with one another. That is much harder to do on a computer, let alone with video. Again, maybe for some fields it makes sense (maybe?). But it's hard to beat ease of use of text. (Also, there's nothing wrong with conforming to a particular style. It's about consistency across authors, which helps the reader. Software projects have style guides, don't they? As well as traditional media outlets. Why shouldn't scientific publications?)
- idrios 4y ago
  > Also, when learning something, it typically takes multiple articles This is where I think video would be most helpful, actually. To relate it to software, when I'm learning a new language or a new tool, a video helps me navigate and learn my unknowns. But when I'm already an expert on a topic, video is intolerable because it takes too long to get to the point and often doesn't have the information I'm looking for. Likewise for science, a video recording for materials and methods would probably be incredibly helpful for replication purposes. Also review papers might lend themselves better to video format because their purpose is to summarize existing research in a way that's digestible to someone relatively new to the field. It doesn't fit all purposes but it would make the science more accessible

t_mann 4y ago

On the career / publishing perspective: I think you're overlooking the fact that an upload to such a peer-review platform would usually be considered non-archival, so the paper could still be published in a prestigious journal. It's basically a pre-print server with a comment function (which already exists in some sort, btw, researchgate.net), and most journals have accepted that they can't stop people from making their papers available through such channels. The bigger threat to this model is probably places like arXiv/SSRN adding similar functionality, but since this seems to be a non-profit project, it would probably mean mission accomplished.

dbingham 4y ago
Someone cribbing our approach would be mission partially accomplished. The idea is to displace the journal system and advance open science and academic publishing. If it accomplishes that goal, mission accomplished. I'll be a little sad if I didn't get to participate, but the whole world of software development awaits and there are other neat projects to work on. If they crib our approach, but execute poorly and don't succeed in opening publishing, that's not mission accomplished, but there's no reason we can't move forward and execute better in that scenario. If they crib the approach and show why it doesn't work, that's also mission accomplished. It shows that this isn't the right solution to the problem. Or maybe we succeed - it remains to be seen. Any of those outcomes - cribbed and failed, cribbed and succeeded, or we fail/succeed in a way that shows whether the concept works clearly - we would consider mission accomplished.

emailtho 4y ago

I don’t disagree that 3 seems valuable, but at the end of the day scientists are just people and should not shield themselves from having to validate and communicate their work given it’s impact on normies. Consider there is still plenty of ways for scientists to communicate undistracted; a site such as this does not mean other forums are obsoleted. Private channels will still exist.