I'm not a coder, an entrepreneur or really skilled in anything, I'm more of a dreamweaver, dependent on others to act out my ideas on my behalf.
These ideas come occasionally but this most recent one has been floating around in my mind for some weeks now, I felt it was time to put it down in tangible words.
Quick steemSTEM plug
Most reading know that I'm part of the SteemSTEM team but since it is the foundation of my upcoming idea, I should quickly introduce it. We are a manual curation team that promotes posts written about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects, but also venture into other areas if suitable such as humanities and sci-fi.
We have quite a few very real scientists with real published work out there, including at least two people who have worked at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, numerous Chemists, Engineers and Biologists, and they all see the value in this community we're building together.
So in short, we reward written work with STEEM, and in return, the authors provide free, public access to their written work. Capiche?
The problems
Why can't that be extended to the 'real world'?
There are numerous problems researchers and academics face in the brutal world of publication:
Funding
Funding can be a very limiting force that breeds dishonesty and manipulation of results and even the agenda on the whole. To get private funding, one needs to pander to the whims and desires of the company hiring you. To get funding from the government, well perhaps that's actually kind of the same these days, but with less money.
To get published in a journal, positive results get far more favour overr negative or neutral results, which encourages individuals to skew results or emphasize bias to reach this end goal.
I'm sure many scientists out there can address many more issues regarding funding, and though there are many nuances to this argument (such as how papers are often purchased much cheaper in bundles, and real-world prices, in some cases have actually dropped), the fact remains that the people and the public by and large can't or aren't willing to pay.
Accessibility
Similarly, access to papers is getting harder and harder to come by and prohibitively expensive. Some journaly ask for a monthly subscription fee that I've seen reach over $50, and others ask for upwards of $100 per paper.
This breeds creations such as sci-hub and torrents and other illegal innovations that swipe the funding right out of the researchers' hands. In their defense, for developing nations, accessing such journals can be nothing short of impossible with such huge price tags and they have but little choice but to turn to illegal measures.
For the casual readers, they cannot get funded access to these journals, alienating the realm of scientific inquiry from the mainstream audiences which surely breeds a culture of misinformation and conspiracy as only pop-sci and anti-sci viral-desperate journalists have access to them and can re-phrase them however they see fit for the world to see.
Readability
It's getting increasingly uncommon to see research that is even remotely readable to the common eye. Most are designed to be read by fellow researchers in the same field, those whose lives are dedicated to learning the complex terminology and numbers.
Even if all papers magically became free, who would even read them? YAWN. In fact, a team of Swedish researchers actually quantified this phenomenon.
As an article on nature self-depricatingly points out, it prides itself as a rather publicly accessible journal, with sentences such as:
Here we show that in mice DND1 binds a UU(A/U) trinucleotide motif predominantly in the 3' untranslated regions of mRNA, and destabilizes target mRNAs through direct recruitment of the CCR4-NOT deadenylase complex.
Where does STEEM come in?
SteemSTEM alone has rewarded around $1,500,000 to blogs and articles according to the tag search on Steemit, and we are but a small community of manual curators.
To expand into the real world, one could create a new front end on the steem blockchain dedicated to freely accessible published papers, something that is much needed by a lot of people around the world.
Readability
Rather than just posting giant, complicated PDF documents onto the blockchain, I imagine an author could instead post the abstract alone, or even a personal blog on their current research or proposal.
This would work well to bridge that gap between the mainstream and academia, feeding on what is increasingly becoming an attention economy.
Accessibility
One could provide access to the journals which are held on a frontend (say, research.steem) in which the papers are only accessible by Steem account holders but otherwise paid for by concept of upvote donation.
The full papers need not be part of the blockchain, but the initial abstract would be like any other post on steemit or busy etc.
This would disincentivize sci-hub style theft and encourage users to join steem in droves around the world to get access to valuable resources they otherwise couldn't afford.
Funding
Funding would come in a kind of 'circle jerk' form as is traditional on the steem interfaces, with supporting professionals, curious readers and manual curators such as steemSTEM adding value.
I envisage groups investing their own money for a greater return whilst building an exponential STEM community which would also evolve STEEM into a more reputable internet database.
Potentially, businesses could be woo'd into providing larger investments with the confidence that they would not only have their delegations secured to be returned at will, but the actual funding in the form of upvotes would be far less painful for them than traditional direct funding.
A 1,000,000 Steem investment delegation could provide $300 chunks of funding per post on a given subject, and that's ignoring the support from outside minds supporting the project.
Freedom
Possibly the best aspect of this is that the researchers could possibly have creative freedom to do with their work what they please, be it debates or humourous experiences or intense analyses - it would be their responsibility to maximise their own profits - unless they were being funded by one of those said business investors, then they could literally post memes. Related memes, hopefully.
What do you think?
The next thing for me to do is small, since I cannot implement the idea, nor can I refine it, but for now I'd appreciate it if readers trashed the idea below so I can find out if it has any obvious yet fatal flaws in its concept.
Meanwhile I'm going to get in touch with some individuals who have had personal experiences struggling with publishing their work and financing their work, see what they think.
Personally I think this is a fantastic way to grow the steem blockchain in just one of many ways it has potential to transform the world that have yet to be realized. Similar ideas have already been attempted with tokens built on Ethereum, and others have done similar ideas with creative content (such as musiccoin).
The difference is Steem already has an established community on a website that has passed above 1,000 in the most visited websites, on a blockchain that has been ranked the highest on weiss ratings (fastest transaction speed, most transactions, zero fees etc). It could easily steem ahead with this concept and potentilly hit the headlines if successful.
But hey, prove me wrong please!
Cheers!
In particle physics, we have found our ways to address this issues:
Although particle physics is small, why would not other areas of science be able to do the same? Money maybe?
By the way, I just wrote my 63th referee report. This corresponds to 1/3 of a year of work for free for those publisher companies... This is another problem, I think, in terms of unfairness...
I don't see how STEEM could help there, but this is definitely something we could discuss (potentially with the Pevo people)
As I was reading, I was asking just that; why can't other fields just do the same thing? The scoap initiative is funded by CERN, which is funded by 21 states so i suppose in the grand scheme, Particle physics is a small blip in the pockets of these governments compared to, say, Pharma or conservation so yeah, maybe its the scalability that's an issue.
I'd like to prioritize the accessibility to mainstream audiences via social media though above financial aspects I think; aside from popsci videos you might casually scroll past on facebook, this is an underperforming aspect of society in my opinion
Then you may need some double stream: science for scientists and those we want, and science for anyone. No?
Why dont' we go even further?
Here is my proposal article on creating "Open Source Innovation Infrastructure For The Benefit Of Human Well-being and The Planet Organized Through Blockchain."
I call it "innovations by the people for the people" or #byp4p
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@eunnovax/this-is-the-most-powerful-blockchain-killer-app-that-everyone-missed-so-far
Great idea and solid arguments. I would certainly like to see this become a reality and to help out on the way should you or someone else give it a go.
However, to get anywhere near this end-goal, one would have to have many stepping stones on the way each of which must make sense to the creators and consumers at the margin (I see so many great ideas that will be awesome once there are 10m+ people on it doing whatever is the purpose of the app, but how can it still be good also when there is just 100?)
Here is what I would do. In the short term, I would not try to solve all the problems you describe nor provide all the solutions you suggest, but focus only on one: Readability.
steemSTEM is already working well to provide incentives for scientists and STEM professionals to share their work. Why not have a front end where people can post a digestible and easy-to-read summary of the paper and/or abstract, with a link to the published paper that will still require the potential reader to go beyond a pay wall. Then, I would add a new suggestion to your idea, which is to work with other STEEM communities to make it into a co-creation project. STEEM already has a bunch of great tools such as benefactor rewards to enable multiple people to contribute to posts and earn a share. With steemSTEM building a strong community, and STEEM providing a broad set of talent and the tools to let people collaborate, it could be a front end where anyone can submit a paper they would like to communicate to the public. Then, someone in the steemSTEM community who would not have to be an expert in the field, only literate enough to understand the essence, could help the person write a summary. A joining artist could help make some good looking illustrations that are both original and unique to the resulting article, and easy to understand for a normal reader.
This way, we help overcome quite a few problems without needing to take on the biggest challenge (which is publishing fully on the blockchain). steemSTEM could also aim to compile the best ~10 articles posted every month that use illustration images which we then own and text that are quality ensured by the researcher (so not dumbed down or biased too much by a journalist), and with just a little bit of formatting it could come together as a monthly publication similar to an “Illustrated science” magazine.
Anyway, this is where I see the future value proposition of STEEM. The way in which it enables frictionless collaboration and co-creation with the on-chain trust-less sharing of rewards and open data. If a significant number of scientist then saw the value in presenting parts of their work there, then who knows what one might build on top of that going forward.
I really like the idea of generally broadening the community, an expanding into areas such as artist interpretations. Two great ideas here. There are indeed a lot of systems in place out there that could help this bloom into even a much bigger concept than simply STEM, but publication on the whole.
This also would breed a space for idea generation that I think @tarazkp once proposed. Related, another great idea in these comments was rather than having it built to publish already-done work, it could help build the proposal and track the progress with commentary and methodological improvements.
So you're totally right, a lot of stepping stones are between me and the end result! Worth it though, I think
While we wait for the mainstream scientific community to work out how blockain systems will fit into their world, I think one area worth looking at would be the diybio movement, because there is already a very active maker/diy community on Steem and I think in the same way diybio is a much easier entry path for promoting STEM in the blockchain ecosystem/economy. I am involved in @steemmakers and there is also @thesteemhouse project that are both trying to promote innovation and encourage the maker/diy movement. I think this could be quite interesting for Steemit.
Thank you so much for mentioning @thesteemhouse! Indeed, we are trying to build a real world makerspace that brings Steem to the forefront of my local community. By empowering youth, the elderly, and everyone in between, an opportunity to earn a living doing something they truly enjoy!
We're currently looking to bootstrap the whole thing, and may very well be signing a lease today on a roughly 2000 sq ft space! We're currently looking for early investors who would be interested in earning a portion of the lifelong profits of the @thesteemhouse account!
I could see the benefit of having a Steem front for something like that.
Steemit would not be the site to do it on, but possibly requiring steemit accounts and linking them to an outside site like @dlive does. This linking would be for posting purposes and possibly "upvoting" the publish in some way that wouldn't push the most popular papers to the top/front page of the site.
This would allow a vetting process of some sort to make sure each paper is how it should be and then move on from there...
And since it will be linked to steemit, why not allow the abstract or something similar to be posted on steemit after it is first published on the site?
Say you submit a paper that passes the vetting process and is going to get posted on the publishing site. Once it gets published, your steemit account then posts the abstract or whatever onto steemit with a link to your published paper.
Sorry if this seems like rambling, I'm having a hard time properly explaining what's in my head in regards to this issue.
No this makes sense to me! You're filling in the details that I basically missed out so thanks! I agree that the separation between paper and abstract should be a thing, it would give some level of freedom to, as another comment points out, to still apply a paywall in the early stages of this concept if they please, since it's their right to do so.
Also steemit is so spammy lol
If you really want to go through with this, I'm sure someone would code it and this seems like it could be one of the steemit projects that could get funding through this. There's a funding program in place some people have set up.
Just like @mountainwashere said, keep me updated, please.
Good to get some sound support! I'm thinking of making a discord channel for supporters in all areas to contribute ideas and skills at some point, so i'll get all the coders I know to unite!
I think our current model for scientific research has many problems and a lot of new models have been cogitated for quite some time (specially now with internet and blockchain technology) but it's definitely NOT an easy task (and I don't think there will ever be a one-model-fits-all solution).
You have some interesting ideas that can certainly evolve to something great. I believe any successful model for producing science should try to accomplish the following principles:
1. Free to read: science should belong to humanity and everybody (scientist or not) should have access to knowledge from anywhere in the globe free-of-charge. This is something that Open Access journals and recently Scihub have been trying to do.
2. Free to publish: scientists should not have to pay for publishing their discoveries, it's an unnecessary cost for them. There must be an economically sustainable way to store and maintain the content produced.
3. NO profits: scientific knowledge should not be a product. Scientists should NOT profit from their discoveries.
4. Quality: there must be a way to review scientific content produced. It must be economically sustainable without encouraging any kind of corruption (that is VERY hard).
5. Stop plagiarism and wrong content: a model must be able to discourage false discoveries and plagiarisms and also be able to alert people about it.
6. Credit: Authors and funding institutions must always be credited.
I agree with each and every point. The one barrier preventing its success is that we all happen to be human. The scientific method is the best tool to fight against ourselves but it cannot prevent our greed and desire for profit, for example, which breeds competition, which breeds snide attempts at bias and thus lower quality, and other forms of misinformation and the system collapses once more!
So indeed a more thorough, fool-proof system needs to be implemented, which would take a lot more pondering than what I've laid out here!
I am very impressed by the calibre of people posting scientific related posts on Steemit, and I think many of the models proposed all seem to suffer from the problems that you mentioned (or at least haven't addressed them adequately). I can't see that the blockchain system can be used to solve these issues because it is only a means of decentralizing content and its creation (like Wikipedia), but perhaps it could encourage scientists to be better communicators to the general public and also other scientists from around the world?
I believe blockchain technology could contribute specially on the storage and free aspects that I mentioned. But the bigger challenges are on ensuring quality and stopping plagiarism. If you look here on steemit itself it is a big concern and it should be even bigger on scientific work!
It's a very very very steep climb for that to happen. The standard journal model is deeply entrenched into the fabric of science and stem careers.
Definitely. It would likely just start off as a casual side-income, casual thing. It's a rather long term concept for sure...I'd also expect more adoption from developing countries than, say, the USA
That is awesome... There are so much "destroying" this platform and a few like you trying to restore the steemit greatness.. Don't get me wrong I still think steemit is a great platform and there are none like it.. but that's because of the one's like you and your team.. congrats ;)
heh thanks. It's good for everyone to conjure up ideas; for every 1,000 pieces of trash, one is gonna be great and make it through!
Let's hope that this "one" make it better then the other 1000 to balance the scale right.. :)
Nice approach @mobbs
I totally agree to @justtryme90 to make this platform as a Journal model is bit difficult because there are several things like impact factor, citation and other things. Just sharing the small part of research in the form of abstract or something is ok, but publishing the whole is far away.....but yeah can happen....You never know :)
Well there's nothing stopping a limited access thing, like an abridged version or something. I doubt a single first-time post would become a final product but I wanted to express the most ambitious outcome, perhaps something more realistic will come from it =)
I am going to link drop an article from a few days ago @mobbs about something I heard on a podcast concerning AI research as a supporting post topic.
There are so many opportunities here to decentralise and sensitise research of all kinds for the betterment of the global community.
https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@tarazkp/funding-the-future-through-crypto-gains
Also check out fredrikaa's comment and my response!
Cool! Good to see we're both on the case
I always use the back button when I encounter all those journals that wants me to pay to access their contents. I think steem could be able to pull off such resource where researchers and students could get free access to science journals it'd help grow steem the more. It's encouraging to see the impact such group of individuals like steemstem have been able to achieve in such a such time with limited funding. I'd like to see a development such as this in steem. Thanks for sharing.
There may come a time where I'm notable enough and I've learnt enough coding that I could just do it myself. Pay for some professional promoter, I dunno. Could be a fun endeavour!
Great stuff.
The biggest challenge I see is ensuring quality. Even if there's funding for research, what good if the model leads to bad research being done? Not that most papers being published currently are all that useful... but still, we would want to increase the overall quality of the science being done, not decrease it.
A possible model could be something like this: a researcher submits their proposed experimental design prior to conducting any experiment. Fellow researchers (which will act as peer review AND curation groups) tear apart the experimental design and suggest changes until everything they can think of looks alright. Then they upvote, which provides the funding for conducting the experiment or study. After the experiment is completed, the final paper with the results is published. As a bonus, the data could be uploaded to some open data database where other researchers can access it.
Sorry for not trashing your idea as you requested. Try harder to come up with a worse idea next time and I'll do my best.
For quality, the ideal concept would simply be the curators, the self policing from a democratically voted group of quality checkers - an advanced steemSTEM. The problem then however would be more emphasis on objectivity, since we currently vote on objectivity first, then subjectivity based on creativity, style etc. A blog could succumb to subjectivity but the paper itself should have some objective minimum payment. I guess...
I would put a stepp between this end and include a post about a progress report to show they're adhering to the methodology agreed upon. This is a good adaptation of my idea, making it more present tense, whereas mine was more trying to reward already completed products.
It brings to light a whole new wave of ideas!
Now this I can do =P
There is a required minimum budget for each study, right? It doesn't help to have only half of it, or only 80%. 100% of the needed budget has to be there in order for the study to even begin, otherwise there probably won't be a point in starting it and not being able to finish it. Unless there is some other funding source, that is. If there is, the researcher can apply to the STEEM curation group and ask for, say, 50% of the needed funding, and specify where the other 50% will come from. That's a totally viable model, too. The point is, though, that the curators either have to fund the entire amount asked for, or nothing. The research cannot proceed if there's only a little bit of the needed money. That's how I'm thinking of it. Although I'm sure more flexible/sophisticated funding models can be developed, but probably at a later stage.
For the funding criteria, an approach can be developed where the proposed studies that have the highest benefit to society (or to the research field) and the lowest budget cost will get the highest funding priority. To put it more simply, the greatest benefit and lowest cost is what you probably want to fund first.
For this to work, the estimated benefit of a proposed piece of research has to be quantified. The way you do it can even be something totally stupid as asking the researchers in the field to vote from 1 to 10 on how useful this research will be in their view. So you get some estimate of the benefit of the study - of course, better ways to do it can be developed.
The other part you need is the budget, which is already quantified, so no trouble there.
Then you prioritize using a formula, for example: estimated benefit / budget. Through this, you will get a single number for each proposed study, and you prioritize by that number. The available funding will go to the proposed studies at the top of the prioritized list who have passed through the peer review process.
Would be happy to hear your thoughts. And yeah, having a progress report definitely sounds like a useful additional step.
If you find someone to code it, I'm down to help pay for at least a little bit of it, and definitely down to help spread the word about it and help out in any other ways I can! This idea rocks, I'm super excited about it!
Cool! Though this is a very vague early-day blueprint. If I keep passionate about it, I can easily envision it being some kind of utopian-style system for scientists... here's hoping! I know plenty of coders who could be willing to listen...
Keep me updated!
Nice post - I'm actually working on writing up a very similar idea myself, there's huge potential here. One point regarding your comment "This breeds creations such as sci-hub and torrents and other illegal innovations that swipe the funding right out of the researchers' hands." This misrepresents how Scientific publishing works. Scientists donate their work to journals for free, most top journals (excluding those few run by scientific societies) take all the profit for themselves and their shareholders. Therefore Sci-hub doesn't generally stop a single penny going back to researchers as none would have been given to them by the the publishers anyway.
Oh of course that's a valid point, and in fact there are many schemes out there having scientists actually pay to publish, which is something researchers would buy into because of the desperate culture forcing them to do so, or get out.
I suppose it all further emphasizes the rough world it is out there for many
I am so happy I stumbled upon this post! I came to steemit searching for a platform to find like minded people regarding STEM specifically science and environmental health! A global team working together can accomplish many great things. I look forward to future posts regarding this and maybe one day I will be able to write an article for you (:
If you're new and not aware, you are welcome to join our community on Discord - a group of purely STEM-empassioned individuals! https://discord.gg/HhZTYW
The community is based on the curation team of which I am a manager of - SteemSTEM so feel free to use the tag steemstem on any related posts you may write ^__^
See you there perhaps!
Only if you get curation systems with extremely high standards of fragmented curation (e.g. you can submit your images to forensic experts, your maths to a statistics experts). Open access lowers the barrier of entry massively and this has pros and cons. The biggest cons are mediocrity and predatory publishing. While there are already open access journals and some of them curated by scientists themselves curation overwhelm and burn out is the single biggest threat to any peer review system.
The answer could be layers and layers of channels opened and closed for curation.