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RE: The Scientific Journal Industry is Monopolized and Broken — Here’s How Blockchain Can Fix It
Reputation is very important. But if reputation can be bought, this won't work. Anyone from the outside world could come and buy his/her reputation (from how I understood how your platform is supposed to work, reputation can indeed be bought).
Here, you start from zero. No well-known editors will be on board and no well-known scientists. So my question is how to attract legit scientists and how having them on board? Prestige/money is not enough. Please tell me why I should come, for instance?
I agree 100%. If reputation can be bought, it could possibly have a negative affect on the quality of the research being published. This is why we've been working on an economic model that mimics the real world- scientists will have to earn their reputation through commenting/collaboration or publishing. Curating won't provide you with any significant amount of influence (if any at all). They also won't be able to "buy" their reputation past a certain threshold.
Also, the amount of influence that you're able to pass on will decrease proportionally as you move further and further away from your core field of expertise. So, for instance, if you're a chemist, your influence will hold less weight when commenting on a paper about developmental psychology. However, your influence will still probably hold decent weight in organic chemistry.
To address your last point: how do we plan on bringing scientists to the platform? One idea that we had is publish hundreds of thousands of research papers from a database onto Lab Ledger in order to populate it with content. Once the research papers are uploaded, users can begin curating and commenting on them.
The papers themselves will accumulate money that the real-world author can claim once they sign up for the site. That's just one idea we've had of many. We're also going to include bounties for solving problems in specific fields, and possibly our own version of a "Nobel Prize".
We're quite motivated and we are making big connections in the scientific industry. This time next year we'll have a lot of traction and I predict we'll have many scientists on the platform.
Hopefully you'll be one of them :)
I am afraid this does not answer my questions...
Things are really not clear to me. I cannot foresee how the scientists will come to labledger and grows your database. Just like that?
This reinforces my initial thoughts. You may be slightly far off the real concerns of the scientific world (at least the part of it I know).
I am sorry but not for now. I have way better alternatives. Please have a look to the arxiv or scipost to start with. Your platform can't compete with these.
It wouldn't be a valuable use of my time to convince someone who already has their mind made up, wouldn't you agree? Assuming there isn't anything I could say to change your mind, I'll leave it at this: good luck in your endeavors, and in a year please check back on our progress and you'll be pleasantly surprised. Cheers.
I am saying I have currently alternatives that seem preferable. For the moment and from what I read from your project, I won't change. I am however looking forward to be surprized, as I am a generally open-minded person ;)
So, if I understand correctly: you would rather have scientists earn zero money and zero prestige for their work? Also, remember: in order to truly understand something, you must be able to explain it better than the opposing view. At this point, you know nothing about our economic model, yet, make bold claims about it's value. You mentioned you were a scientist, so I would expect a more unbiased, objective approach. If you don't believe our model can work, then you simultaneously believe that SteemIt can't work either. In which case, I'd say that your opinion is in the far minority.
You didn't get my point at all... Reputation is what matters. Not money. If reputation can be bought / transferred... well, this is a flaw to me.
Comparison with steemit? I don't see the point. Steem maybe, but not steemit in any case. But remember, Steem is not a platform for science. So why comparing apples with pears?
You may be good in economics, I am no one to judge that (and I have never done it). What is clear to me is that your vision of the world of science is quite far from reality. And if you read carefully my messages, this is what I was pointing out. I don't criticize your model, I am just saying it does not apply to the world of science.
Well if you think so... Not my problem.
PS: you didn't answer any of my question. I asked you to convince me to use your platform. You didn't even try to.
We've interviewed many scientists. Some value prestige, some value money, and some value both (some don't care about either one).
We shouldn't paint all scientists with a single brush. Also, if you think reputation is important, then you'll absolutely love our platform.
We are an accounting system for reputation (basically, we quantify/tokenize it). Also, as I mentioned earlier in our comments, we are going to limit the amount of reputation a scientist can purchase.
In other words, they will need to earn it from their peers. We are mimicking how the real world works. The only thing we're changing is that we are removing the middleman. Everything else will be the same.
P.S. It's important to put yourself in the shoes of younger scientists. You may be a senior scientist, in which case, you may have an easier time acquiring funding or reputability from your peers. Younger scientists don't have that luxury and value money very much in order to kickstart their research.