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Kaela S. SingletonScientific publishing is broken — we have a new strategy to fix it and need your help.
The methods used in the current publishing system to quality control, rank, and disseminate science are antiquated, slow, expensive, and unfair. Scientists are being exploited as reviewers, authors, and subscribers; for a $18.4 billion dollar industry that makes higher profit margins than Google and these profits go to corporations, not science. At its core, publishing was built on the principle that science is a one-time discovery — and that’s not true. Further, journals have turned the peer-review process into a system that fosters adversarial dynamics among researchers, and fails to provide contemporary, creative avenues for constructive criticism and collaboration.
But in a world where pre-print servers like bioRxiv receive 500 submissions a week, how do we choose which ones to read? What the journals give us is curation: a trusted “brand” telling us what they think is worth our time.
What we don’t (really) get from journals, that we actually need:
- An objective, systematic rating of the quality of the science
- A paper’s impact or importance—that is allowed to evolve over time
Our solution? A science-driven revolution that allows us to own all the content, in one place, with our own rules for the curation and economics. This is a new way to store and grade discoveries in real-time, owned and operated by a distributed community — Discovery Stack/Discovery Curator. Check out this intro to our concept and Pilot.
Learn more about our pilot and future iterations of Discovery Stack/Discovery Curator here.
This campaign is designed to address our collective frustration with publishing and how we currently share our scientific ideas and results. Through a series of “idea engine” meetings the pilot was co-developed by Ken Cadwell, Stacie Dodgson, Hugo Gonzalez Velozo, Philip Hwang, Max Krummel, Mike Kuhns, Beiyun Caitlin Liu, José Ordovás-Montañés, and Ferdinando Pucci with guidance from SolvingFor staff. A solution that we hope is fast, fair, and formative.