Connecting Steemit, scientific research and academia?

Hello Steemians,

During the last few days, I have read and answered to a couple of posts discussing research, academia and Steemit

[image credit: twimg]

See for instance here, here and there. In addition, I have heard about the pevo project (whose white paper is here) from both my brother-in-law @cryptoctopus and @coinbitgold . After thinking a couple of nights about that, I decide to write this post that collects my thoughts (and may cause ripples in the waters as well, as I disagree with a few arguments already stated several times): What could Steemit do for research?

[image credit: flyingfishonline]

Steemit funding research?

In a few posts, one has several times suggested that steemit could fund academic research. Although this idea is lovely, it is in my opinion not entirely viable. That is true that one of the greatest pain we have, as researchers, is to write proposals to get travel grants, money for hiring postdocs and PhD students and therefore build a research team.

I am at the moment quite convinced that Steemit cannot help for hirings. It is sufficient to check how much SBD are collected by typical scientific posts and how much money is needed to hire non-tenured researchers. Typical PhD salaries are of about 2 kEUR (or 2 kUSD) a month (including taxes that must be paid to the state) and postdoc ones are higher, sometimes reaching 5kEUR or 5kUSD a month. And when someone is hired, it must be at least for two years... You cannot ask someone to move to another place (sometimes to another country) for a few months (that is not humanly great and no one will usually accept). The maths do the rest.

Now, one thing for which I believe Steemit could bring a valuable help for research is connected to small-scale specific needs of a couple of thousands of EUR (or USD). Such an amount of money can definitely be gathered from upvotes issued from one single post. I guess that the point that should be clarified is really what a scientist can do with such a money. A lot! For instance, it could be used as a travel grant for a single researcher, who could be possibly independent and not connected to the research community (and then use the money to become connected), as support money to organize some workshop or event on a dedicated topic, or to develop the scientific activities around one given research group or institute. etc., etc., etc. The benefits for Steemit would be to attract more experts from the scientific community that could then post, e.g., threads related to science outreach or be involved in what is discussed below.

Although this sounds cool, one clear issue is that any scientific funding originating from upvotes will be disconnected from the opinion of the scientific experts. What I call expert is someone that acquired some knowledge about a field and that is recognized by his/her peers through the quality of his/her work. There is nothing related to politics or friendship. We need experts. Let us assume for a minute that we do not care about expert opinions. In this case, popular topics will always win, even if the scientific content is questionable. And science is not sensationalism. Some reviewing system is desired. It is not because something is boring that it does not deserve to be studied and that it may not be the key to awesome discoveries later. Although we are not able to tell anything about the future, scientific experts are the only ones that can judge that the boring stuff is interesting with respect to the current state-of-the-art or why this boring stuff can help in going beyond the actual limitations. While everyone can probably tell why this or that idea seems interesting or cool, only experts can demonstrate whether this is viable or really interesting.

The naive way would be to create some scientific board that will contact experts that will write reports that will be read by the board that will take the decisions. And we are back to how the system currently works! If one wants something different and maintain scientific quality, one needs novel ideas (that I do not have at the moment).

To summarize, I think that the Steemit way could already help scientific research. Not on the hiring level, but on the more local side. The pending question being how to judge what deserves being supported and what is good science.

[image credit: Mario Barbatti]

Publications?

Do we still need scientific journals? Let me take my field (theoretical particle physics) as an example (that is the example I actually know). When a publication is written, it is first submitted to a platform named arxiv where anyone with an account can submit a paper. The only requirement is that one should be endorsed. Being endorsed means that you have a kind of godfather or godmother who validates your reputation. Nothing too crazy...

Those arxiv papers are searchable by titles, authors, etc., either directly on the arxiv website or via Inspire where the search engine is very developed. And they can be downloaded for free. In short, one have a way to store all scientific papers on a platform where they are available for free to all the community and actually anyone with an internet connection. And the arxiv is now also there for other fields (see the arxiv main page).

However, a paper on the arxiv does not mean that the science in there is correct. The only way to carry a conclusive statement here is peer-reviewing. Within the current system, this is where scientific journals (and their outrageous costs) come in. They have editors (are they paid? This I do not know.) who choose one or more referees (that are usually not paid) that will accept or reject the paper, or ask for clarifications and/or modifications. Scientific quality must be connected to peer-reviewing. Upvotes cannot and should not replace it. And we are back to the issue already raised above. What the general public thinks is one thing, but the general public should not enter into the process of deciding what is good or bad quality science. We need specialists and experts for that.

One exception, still related to my field: JHEP, the Journal of High Energy Physics. This journal is run entirely over the web (there is thus no paper version and the publications are distributed electronically), it is free, and it has today one of the largest impact factor of all journals of my field. In addition, reviewers are paid for their work (again, I do not know for the editors).

Therefore, there are ways to get rid of the usual publisher’s company (and I provided working examples above), but peer-reviewing must be guaranteed. Other mechanisms such as upvotes by the general audience should not enter in the process of decision. Something that sounds cool, interesting or that seems to have a great potential for the mankind may be a mirage, and this can sometimes only be clarified by experts.

[image credit: pevo]

Pevo running on steem?

It is not clear to me how the pevo project is connected to this. My impression is that it shares a lot with the working examples that I have mentioned above. One crucial point not raised enough in my opinion is that scientists are generally not looking for money for themselves (remember that private companies pay way more than academia so that those who have chosen to stay in the academic system are not those looking after money): recognition from peers plays the most important role. This should be part of any system to wants to revolutionize academia (and this seems to be missing up to now).

The novelty I like with the pevo proposal is the connection with the general public. But this also has to be thought deeply. Scientific articles as such are usually not readable by the crowds, and the crowds should not decide about good and bad science.

Voila! I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts. At least, I enjoyed writing them :)

Cheers,

Benjamin