[jspaulding]

My startup, Thinklab, is trying fix the incentives. The concept is to partner with science funders and help them distribute their money in a way that rewards scientists for openly sharing their work in real-time while collaborating with each other over the Internet. The first simple step is requiring researchers to openly post their proposals in order to get funding. A portion of funding is then set aside to reward valuable contributions from the scientific community. We would love to have the support and participation of YC Research.

[gonehome]

I think that's cool and could lead to more collaboration/others also being able to easily reproduce experiments too (assuming the tool for them collaborating over the internet is really good and they want to use it).

The tricky part is that the current system may act as a filter where the best people will still try to hide their methods and get into the existing Journals because it's best for their career - so you'll get lower quality requests for funding.

I don't understand why Universities don't work together to push towards open access, but I guess they're interested in Journal prestige too.

As a side note there's also the issue with papers hiding critical components of their research so they can't be reproduced (so they can make companies later) - this is really not in the spirit of science.

[jspaulding]

> The tricky part is that the current system may act as a filter where the best people will still try to hide their methods and get into the existing Journals because it's best for their career - so you'll get lower quality requests for funding.

Yes you could be right about that. It's possible that in the short term an individual funder could see a drop in the quality of applicants -- but I think this will be offset by massive increase in overall impact. I think science funders underestimate how much power they have to compel change.