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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Academic research/funding is broken - it'd be cool if there was a way to create something to fix the incentives.

I think that's kind of the goal of YC research in a narrow sense, but it'd be interesting if there was a way to align the incentives so scientists collaborated more instead of hiding research so they don't get 'scooped'. At this same time this could get rid of the academic journals that charge huge amounts of money for access to publicly funded research by selling prestige to desperate researchers (so they can get more funding).

If research was somehow more like open source development where people got credit for their contributions and hypothesis, experiments and papers were worked on in the open (all open access) maybe science and research would be better.

I think scientists want this and universities would want this - there needs to be a better way to get credibility than publishing papers in famous journals.

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Science Exchange (YC S11) is solving this problem. The basic idea is that instead of the "authorship bartering" model that's pervasive in research today we move towards a market-based collaboration model. Basically we encourage researchers to collaborate because it's financially lucrative to do so. By making researchers wealthy they're able to release themselves from being dependent on prestige publications for generating funding. As a result of this we can start to deprecate the somewhat toxic "public or perish" incumbent system. If your entire livelihood relies on being published in a high impact journal you're incentivized to do anything to make that happen. That is not a system that promotes accuracy of information.

This sounds like a good idea and is solving part of the problem (getting funding), I suspect solving prestige will be harder though - it's not just money that drives it (YC may be in a unique position to be able to grant prestige).

Scientists want to be published in 'Nature' because it's good for their career (citations) and respect from peers. If there was a way to fix that incentive where it was more prestigious to do the research in the open and by collaborating (like FOSS development) that would be a big win.

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.

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.

> 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.

"get rid of the academic journals that charge huge amounts of money for access to publicly funded research by selling prestige to desperate researchers (so they can get more funding)." Quite well said. I think we really need two things to make that happen. 1. provide cool alternative to private companies selling prestige; and 2. exert more pressure by people from outside on the academia administrators and researchers. The current academic system is rotten, but it is, unfortunately, quite stable.

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