Like any community site there is a serious chicken and egg problem. Even more so in academia where there is a very engrained sense that research and discussion should happen behind closed doors. I can't imagine academics wanting to discuss their opinions too openly for fear of it coming back to damage their reputation later. If you could foster an academic community which was more open it would have a positive effect on the whole of academia, but then we're talking about changing an institution not just building a community.
I notice that you have made a point of being able to change the anonymity of a comment at any time. I think this is one way to help with fear of damaging reputation so good job with that.
I've got quite a few thoughts on the problem and ideas to go about tackling these issues. I don't know if they'll ever come to anything, but I'd love to bounce them around with people working in this area. My email address is in my profile if you'd like to chat.
Even more so in academia where there is a very engrained sense that research and discussion should happen behind closed doors. I can't imagine academics wanting to discuss their opinions too openly for fear of it coming back to damage their reputation later.
There's an increasing amount of it happening, but in a fairly decentralized way (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), organized around various researchers' blogs. Certain areas have slightly more centralized community-hub type discussion forums as well, like Lambda the Ultimate for programming languages research.
Yes, different fields will have different styles. Perhaps my language was too strong but I meant that people generally don't like to publish (make public) their current research ideas until they have something well formed and complete.
I agree on all your points. This is my attempt at getting a foot in the door--focusing on computer scientists, who have proven more open to these kind of changes; keeping things anonymous but attributable; making the site useful (hopefully) to practitioners and folks outside of academia, etc. We'll see if it is enough.
I'd love to hear your ideas, I'll definitely follow up with an email. Thanks.
You do know about arxiv.org, right? This is the de facto place for preprints in all of the fields that I know of, and is pretty much removing the need for publications altogether. But it is definitely limited from a technology perspective. Search is poor, subscription types are limited, no comments or rankings (though many would argue that these last two are undesirable, at least on the original site), etc. Would be nice if you could provide a front end to the arXiv, but the amount of data on there is insane and you will need some hardcore computing power to keep up. You could start with the cs papers first, though.
You really need to subdivide all the arxiv sub-disciplines. Noone's going to look at the full arxiv output, there's just too much unrelated stuff for whatever you're looking for.
very interesting. Outside of computer science, it will be very difficult to break through existing academic structures, but if you can find a (responsible and efficient) way to do it, the possibilities are very promising. Take medical research for example- all major medical studies are submitted to paper journals (it may be a bit of an antiquated system) and reviewed by experts on the editorial boards. Theoretically, you should be able to get your study reviewed not just by a single expert, but by every expert on that subject regardless of geographical location or journal affiliation. Just some food for thought...
>Theoretically, you should be able to get your study reviewed not just by a single expert, but by every expert on that subject regardless of geographical location or journal affiliation.
This is definitely a direction I would like science.io to go in in the future
I've worked on some medical publications, and you would need a very good rating system. There are all sorts of low-quality manuscripts that uninformed consumers might cling to if its quality (and the quality of reviewers) is not made very clear. This is true about all publications, but especially medical ones where many patients are beginning to look at the sources themselves. Maybe you could even provide two versions of each article; a "professional version" and a summarized "consumer version" for the regular non PhD folk...
This is nice. I think crowd-sourced analysis is a massive resource that has not been investigated nearly enough. I would love to browse feedback on PubMed papers, as it could really save time.
Perhaps by incorporating a Methods Exchange of some sort, you might be able to draw in the Life Science folk a bit more. Although we are cagey about our pubs, we are pretty open to talk about methodology. That could be a project of its own, but the angle might be worth considering.
Just a minor suggestion: I'd add a tooltip for the Featured Papers' topics/categories. The big two letter acronyms took me a second to decipher before I noticed they're all CS-related. Would probably be a lot more confusing once (/if?) you've added non-CS topics to the set, as well.
I actually started working on something like this a week or two ago called falsifiable.org. My time is limited but I've thought about the project a lot. You seem to be doing what I want anyway, so please drop me an email for an exchange of ideas.
I really want to see some technology mojo pumped into academia. I've spent a fare amount of time thinking about it, so here's an idea dump for you.
* A markup feature for people to highlight and comment on specific portions of a paper. This would allow students to flesh out missing details and allow researchers to ask more directed questions. The markup could also allow for links to more expanded discussion of concepts, such as on a wiki. People could also go back over time and add markups to the paper to direct people to new developments. The paper would essentially become self-documenting. This encourages more people to read, and may even encourage more interdisciplinary work, by allowing for paper documentation that would ease the burden for a researcher unfamiliar with the paper's jargon.
* How to solve the Chicken and egg problem? Target students, especially graduate students. They are young, more tech savvy, and are more idealistic about research (more willing to be open, less territorial). Give students a tool that will really help them (reading research papers is very hard, time consuming, and intimidating for students).
If a paper isn't available on your service, encourage students to contact the authors to submit a print to the arxiv. Do this whenever someone searches for a paper and it isn't found, and try and make it as easy as possible for the student to contact the author (scrape the corresponding author's email from the original journal?), as well as providing a template email (something that says "Hi, I'm very interested in your paper, and would like to discuss it in detail with other students. There is a great technology that allows for this, but requires that your paper be on arxiv. Would you consider uploading a print of your paper to arxiv? The open discussion should increase the range of interest in your work.")
Encourage professors to encourage students to use the markup. A professor will often assign a paper to a student to read, sometimes as a class project. If the result of that work was a rich collaborative discussion that created a resource for other students and researchers to more easily understand a paper then I believe professors would be excited about the service. In fact, it would make their lives easier because they would have a ready made bag of potential projects for students.
* Integration with a collaborative wiki would be fantastic. I'd like to see a wiki for every subdomain of research. I should be able to go from a paper back to the correct point of discussion in a wiki, and vis a versa. The journal/paper system in academia is a mess, lacking any cohesion. Having a popular open journal will not in itself solve the issue of cohesion.
Populating the wiki could again piggy back on the work of graduate students. Rather than a professor suggesting a student write up a 10 page paper on some topic that will never be seen by anyone but the professor, instead the student could flesh out a section of the collaborative wiki. This is great for the student (the work isn't meaningless) and also great for the professor (there will be many gaps in the wiki, providing for an easy grab bag of projects to assign. Indeed, you could even make it easy for the professor by having a section in every subdomain listing holes in the current wiki).
* I see work to reform academia in the same light that I see work to reform education (such as the Khan academy). Perhaps you can find allies there, as well as potential investors. Ultimately, if academia could be freed of the parasitic journal system the amount of money freed up could easily fund the development and maintenance of a very polished and sophisticated system.
All in all, I strongly believe that if a powerful collaborative tool were available for students/researchers then the chicken and egg problem could be overcome and real changes could be made in the academic community. I'm going into my first academic job this fall (as a post-doc) and would love to have some software I could point other academics and students to. If the software were right I would proselytize it. My email is in my about if you want to chat more.
I notice that you have made a point of being able to change the anonymity of a comment at any time. I think this is one way to help with fear of damaging reputation so good job with that.
I've got quite a few thoughts on the problem and ideas to go about tackling these issues. I don't know if they'll ever come to anything, but I'd love to bounce them around with people working in this area. My email address is in my profile if you'd like to chat.