[hvocode]

I’m not seeing what’s new here compared to github, figshare, zenodo, overleaf, authorea, etc. Github is actively used for scientific papers and code development. Heck, there are open journals that are based on github for both the paper submission and review process (see Journal of Open Source Software). Figshare and Zenodo are used for artifact hosting and citation. Overleaf and Authorea are used for collaborative editing and publishing to journals and archive sites. Publons exists for tracking peer review activity. All of these have some collaboration with institutions pushing the open science movement forward, be it large research institutions like CERN, non-profits, universities, funding agencies, etc. I don’t see any connection of Researchhub to the open science movement - just some “founders in San Francisco”.

I really don’t see what this adds other than a cryptocurrency component and a leaderboard. I’m not convinced that the missing component in modern science is some form of internet points.

[Disclaimer: I’m a couple decades post-PhD, actively working as a researcher the whole time on all sides : publishing my work, peer reviewing others, and the editorial side helping the whole process work. I am very happy to see progress towards making science work better, but have learned to be super skeptical of startups sniffing opportunities in this space.]

[darawk]

Even if they just rebuilt github, but oriented the UI towards academic publishing and peer review, that would be a potentially valuable product.

The integration of the cryptocurrency certainly has the potential to veer off in scammy directions, but it also has the potential to introduce incentive design mechanisms to solve some of the issues plaguing academic research at the moment. E.g. incentivizing replication.

[onlyforthat]

having internet points as a motivation could be worst possible thing. See reddit for example

[picardo]

Reddit started allowing its users send cryptocurrency to each other recently as well, through "community coins." ResearchHub's model isn't that different.

[fsflover]

What about the Hacker News?

[the-dude]

Hacker News does not display the karma of comments, only to the owner.

[fsflover]

But it sorts the comments based on karma.

[dbingham]

The missing component is the openness more than anything. That and having a central space to go for research. I agree that the crypto attached to this is really weird, and the fact that it seems to be a for-profit is less than ideal.

But the idea of a Github or Stackoverflow for research that uses technology to crowdsource and mediate the review process (both pre and post publish) and then makes that process (at least the post publish part) open and available for the public to see has a ton of merit and potential value.

I grew up in academia. My parents are both academics, as are my god parents. But for any number of reasons I chose not to go into academia. I used to scoff at the whole idea of an ivory tower when I was on the inside, but having spent a decade and a half on the outside I now understand.

Science is completely walled off from the public. It's happening in institutions that charge more than a house for access, and published in a massive constellation of journals which charge $15 to $30 per paper, or hundreds to thousands of dollars per year for full access.

When you take the cost of a single paper, the fact that papers on any particular topic are often spread across a myriad of journals, and consider the fact that science works in the aggregate then add in the media's dismal scientific reporting track record and is it any wonder we have a crisis of scientific understanding and trust? Once you leave academia, your access to the truths it produces is completely cut off.

We need to find a way to break the journal system. The things they provide to the scientific community - editorial assistance, review, and reputation - really ought to be easily replaced by crowdsourcing and software. We just need to build that software and then convince the scientific community to use it.

The benefits to science and society could be massive, because a public that understands and trusts science means a public more willing to fund science, and a society that has a way to agree upon what is and isn't true.

[nynx]

A research-oriented wrapper website around github/git would be just as useful as this and possibly more so.