First of all, I'd like to express my gratitude to all you who manifested support for the Hive-Science initiative! Special thanks to @gtg for his very important support!
Since my introductory post, I learned (thanks to @gtg, what a fine lad!) about the PEvO project, initiated by @pharesim in 2016. I was very pleased to be in contact with him and learn that we share the idea (dream?) of using blockchain technology to try to make scientific communication more efficient, democratic and censorship-resistant. I invite you all to read the PEvo [Publish and Evaluate Onchain] whitepaper:
https://pharesim.me/pevo_whitepaper.pdf
It is with great pleasure I announce that @pharesim and I will join forces to try to make this goal a reality! It won't be easy, that's clear, but I'm hopeful that with resilience and force of will, slowly and steadily, we'll eventually succeed in offering a viable alternative to the highly detrimental, perhaps even parasitic, scientific communication model currently being enforced in academia.
For more info on PEvO, there's also this nice talk given at the 2016 SteemFest in Amsterdam:
WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS?
As I see it, we should now focus on two aspects:
Conscientise more scientists about the disadvantages and problems of the scientific communication model in current use (see my introductory post for a succinct listing) and how a blockchain like Hive can address these issues. To this end, we will:
a} introduce Hive to university students [more details about this in my next post, coming in a week or two];
b} offer a series of talks and workshops, to students, professors and the general community, about blockchain, Web3, Hive, and the vices of the established scientific publishing model;
c} publish (both on Hive as a pre-print, and in some regular scientific journal) a formal article revising the issues, problems and pains associated with the established scientific publishing model, and discuss how blockchain could be used to improve this situation.Build a frontend to allow for the efficient publication of scientific pre-prints and conduction of peer-review on Hive, everything done on-chain. As I see it, the main features such infrastructure will need, that current Hive frontends lack, are:
a} a very explicit and convenient way to track all versions of a given post, so that each version of a post is treated as a distinct publication (this is absolutely needed, to ensure immutability of the scientific record and to allow for efficient peer-review on Hive);
b} an efficient way to link posts, specifically thinking of structuring a peer-review process, so that all reviews conducted for a given publication can be easily listed (chronologically) and accessed by the readership.
In the future, we can imagine that specifically-tailored algorithms could be developed and applied to filter thrash / spam, and keep track of something like a "scientific reputation" in some way, which would be linked to a specific Hive account. There's a lot of other exciting and useful things that could be developed / added, please have a look at @pharesim's whitepaper; though I'd argue that the above discussed topics are the most urgent in order to allow for the publication of scientific pre-prints on Hive.
CAN WE EXPECT TO REPLACE IMPACT FACTOR ANYTIME SOON?
Realistically, no. Not for now, at least. This might be unknown to most people, but scientists are currently trapped in a very brutal type of rat race, where the motto "publish or perish" is truer than ever. It will take time before such corrupting system is weakened, and, in order for it to be replaced one day, we must have a viable, efficient alternative publication and evaluation platform / venue. Hence why I argue that we should focus on building an efficient and attractive platform (i.e., Hive frontend) for pre-print publication.
Pre-prints are already widely used by scientists, and their adoption is on the rise, especially because of the enormous delay an article typically suffers before final publication in a formal journal. In fact, there are many websites / platforms offering support for the publication of pre-prints (e.g., ResearchGate), but they are centralised and plagued with censorship (I known this from personal experience!), so they lack all the advantages that the use a blockchain like Hive can offer. Actually I think this is a niche Hive is extremely well poised to compete and win!
Publishing pre-prints on Hive would also make the peer-review more dynamic, meaningful and rewarding. High-quality, meritous articles and reviews would further benefit from Hive's rewarding system, which is an added plus. Finally, it should be highlighted, pre-prints published on Hive (or any other online platform, for the matter) absolutely don't impede the "formal" publication of the same work in a scientific journal. This is important so scientists are able to satisfy the scientometric requirements they are currently subject to.
And that's all for now, thanks for reading! If you are a scientist and would like to contribute to Hive-Science and PEvO, please let us hear from you! Let us know what features a Hive frontend tailored for scientific communication would need. And please help spreading the word!
Stay tuned for more, coming soon!