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Comment by jspaulding | Hacker News Reader

> Academic publishing is obsolete

To expand upon this, it's not just publishing papers behind paywalls that is the problem. The entire system we use to advance humanities shared knowledge is broken. The Internet enables a dramatically more efficient model of scientific collaboration. The problem is academic science has been stuck with a reward system from the 17th century. And quite simply, it does not reward what we want it to reward anymore. However, there is a solution: science funders can distribute their money in a way that creates a very different set of incentives. Sadly, almost all science funders are very conservative organizations. YC Research can play a critical role in catalyzing a transition to an Internet-native model of research. My startup, Thinklab, wants to help. We're a service that helps science funders reward participation in a massively collaborative open online model of research.

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Can we add some nuance here? It is not like in the last few decades there has been no new knowledge generated.

Just in my own field of biology, the amount of progress we have made in understanding how cells regulate themselves (20 year ago we were still teaching DNA->RNA->PROTEINS that do stuff), how immune systems function and can be used (stem cell therapy, cancer treatments, HIV drugs) and the flow of genetic information between organisms (the advance of (whole) genome sequencing into becoming a generic tool) has been mind-boggling.

I agree -- we're making great progress. Science IS working. My point is really just that since the advent of the internet, we've had the potential of making progress much faster.

We are without a doubt making progress, the question is, how much more progress could we be making with a better system to organize the thoughts and efforts of scientists around the world.

I think the computer science department has used internet really well with the open source projects. But, the same can't be said of most experimental sciences. In life sciences, we sometimes wait a few years from when an idea strikes a researcher to academic publication. An open-source collaborative approach could have immensely sped up progress. Not only that, the academic papers often describe only the experiments that succeeded. Anyone trying to reproduce the result will make the same mistakes as the original authors. What a blatant waste of human brain hours!

I agree completely about the system being broken and that innovation would be fantastic (I wrote a few paragraphs below, but in a very different direction). I'll take a close look at Thinklab, and it'd be great to see a dialogue forming here.

Great! I read your comments and have to admit I'm unfamiliar with what a "collaborative atlas" is or would be? But I certainly agree it's a big problem that scientists are only rewarded for publishing papers. There needs to be a way to reward scientists for sharing in smaller chunks -- even just an idea that might help out a peer.

>The entire system we use to advance humanities shared knowledge is broken.

Okay, can you elaborate on why?

Yes. I mean broken in the sense that the incentives of individual scientists are not aligned with what's in the best interests of science a as a whole. It's the reason scientists hoard knowledge and work in silos instead of sharing their work openly while collaborating over the internet. I've written more here: http://thinklab.com/blog/10-consequences-of-a-broken-scienti...

I wonder if scientific progress speeds up in wartime because scientists stop worrying about who gets credit and how things will affect their career and just learn to collaborate until victory is achieved.

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