Comment by joycesticks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joycesticks | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Hi there,

My name's Pat and I'm on the ResearchHub team. Thanks for taking a look at our site and sharing these questions.

"Github for science" is a phrase that describes our long term vision for what ResearchHub can become.

As a poster below mentioned, today's product could be much better described as Reddit for science. It is a v1 designed to test a few hypotheses and bootstrap a community of early adopters who believe in our mission of open scientific communication.

Overtime we plan to add more Github-esque (for lack of a better word) features. Next in the pipeline is a science-specific collaborative text editor that will help teams of scientists publish any kind of research output directly to ResearchHub.

We are still in very early days and have not yet found product market fit. The more critical thinkers we have the better, so if you have any interest in helping us improve ResearchHub I can share a link to our community slack channel.

Thanks again for your interest in our project!

Before you try to “fix” science like this, I would highly recommend walking through your idea with people at an open science conference like RDA Alliance or FORCE11 to get their input.

Before my company was acquired (https://assembl.net) I was building something quite similar. I went to many such conferences to meet with my “target demographic,” and I found many of my preconceptions about the future of open science were quite incorrect. I think I attended more than 10 other conferences, and I always found that the problems that needed to be solved were more social and legal than technological (though technology played a crucial role in glueing these pieces together).

I also know many people who tried to do something like what you’re doing. For example, I went through the CV Labs incubator with the guys at https://orvium.io.

Now I’m working on https://intpub.org and https://liras.org.

The deeper problems, I’ve found, are much less “sexy” because they’re not as technological. The fixes need to come in the form of improved licensing models, better publication of pre-publication results, etc. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these problems, so I’d be interested to talk and hear where you’re at. If you’d like some sober counsel I’d be glad to provide it.

Thank you for your clarifications. I am still a bit confused by the "need" of having a cryptocurrency built into this tool, especially at such an early stage, and as cryptos are getting more fame of financial speculation and less of actual means of payment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com