My name is Patrick and I'm the part of the ResearchHub team. Thank you for taking a look at our site and sharing your thoughts/feedback!
To give a little background - I'm a former PhD student who dropped out and went to medical school after seeing how difficult it was to achieve success as an early-career academic.
We built ResearchHub as a potential solution to what we perceive as the core problem within academia - the bibliometric-based incentive structure.
Job security and research funding flows to the scientists who are the most successful at maximizing their citations. Following Goodhart's law - citations no longer serve their original purpose as a measure for academic quality because they are now a target for behavior. Academia's reliance on bibliometrics unintentionally encourages behaviors that detract from the scientific ecosystem as a whole.
We included a cryptocurrency and corresponding DAO because we believe crypto is an elegant solution which allows a community to democratically manage a malleable incentive structure. To see how this could work in practice, check out Ethereum improvement proposals (https://eips.ethereum.org/). Ethereum is a dynamic incentive structure that aligns the interests of many parties to accomplish a goal. Via EIPs, the Ethereum community is able to improve the protocol overtime in a decentralized fashion.
Today's ResearchHub 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.We are still in very early days and have not yet found product market fit - so we are actively seeking feedback from academics and citizen scientists alike to help us refine our feature set.
Once again, we very much appreciate your time and attention. Thank you for digging into our project and sharing your thoughts on what we hope to accomplish with ResearchHub!
If you have any questions about the project, please feel free to comment here or reach out via email to hello@researchHub.com