RE: The Scientific Journal Industry is Monopolized and Broken — Here’s How Blockchain Can Fix It
I didn't read your whitepaper in details (will do next week, just browsed it for now), but my two cents.
I don't care of not being paid for peer-reviewing (and many don't care too). This is a part of the job. However, I don't peer review anything for non-open-access journals.
I believe that you put too much emphasis on the money, and this may open the door to abuses. A free from money open-access platform will win, IMO. And this already exists, at least in my field (we have a precedent then!) By the way, you mention that it costs something to read a paper. This is wrong. Open access journals exist all over the place (and in all fields).
Some food for thoughts: to continue: you may be missing one possibility: public reviews with anonymous reviewer.
Finally, using your platform for jobs, research funding, etc.. How realistic will this be? Funding a PhD student in Europe is give or take 120.000 EUR. This is a lot of money. Postdoc positions are even more expensive. And not even talking about building experimental apparatus. In some fields, one needs millions...
By the way, it is not impossible to publish papers with negative results. It depends on the field of course. In fact, I have the impression you generalized the situation slightly too much and ignores other attempts trying to address the problem, and that work successfully for now.
In any case, good luck! ;)
Hi, thanks for the reply. As far as not getting paid, that's fine. However, I would imagine that you care about your reputation, right? Similar to SteemIt, users can choose to keep their Lab Dollars vested as Scholar Points to keep their influence/reputation high. So, even if they're not getting paid with money, they're getting paid with prestige (there should be at least one present- pay or prestige). Also, we should consider: what incentivizes good peer review?
At the point, it's purely impact/integrity. If someone peer reviews poorly, there's little to no negative backlash. In Lab Ledger, if someone peer reviews poorly, they are lowering the value of the network, and simultaneously, all of the value of the Scholar Points they have vested. Thus, they are economically incentivized to peer review honestly and objectively. Even if a scientist has all the money in the world, they will still value the influence they've acquired on the platform.
And then they can PASS that influence on to OTHER members that bring VALUE to the network. It's very similar to how, if I'm an author, getting a book review from Stephen King is worth more than getting a book review from Johnny Depp.
Once Stephen King passes that influence on to me, I know have slightly more influence that I could pass on to others.
Thanks for reading.
Always happy to get feedback from members of the scientific community :)
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.