Frustrated Scholar Creates New Way to Fund and Publish Academic Work | Hacker News Reader

Frustrated Scholar Creates New Way to Fund and Publish Academic Work

chronicle.com

69 pointsmathattack21 comments

I love the idea, but bootstrapping is the real tricky bit with a site like this.

Putting aside the grant funding idea, I think you could really democratize academic publishing by adding a StackExchange-like rating system to something like ArXiv, and also building in a conference organization system (this part is actually key). You'd allow researchers to link off-site (even paywalled) content to their profiles (email to the address listed in the author list should be sufficient authentication), and bootstrap the rating system by granting reputation points in certain subfields to authors with recent publications in reputable conferences/journals. You get reputation by people who already have it positively reviewing your papers. The system gets papers by including a really good conference organization system (in-person networking is still very worthwhile, even if we solve the journal problems of distribution and peer review), which requires conference submissions to be put into the system, along with the reviewers comments. You'd fund the thing (and weed out junk submissions) by imposing a relatively nominal fee (say $50) for lifetime hosting.

Such a system is technically possible, but it would need to achieve critical mass to actually replace the existing journal system.

(I should mention I'm coming at this from the perspective of a computer science researcher - in a lot of the subfields of CS the most expensive parts of doing research are 1) your time and 2) institutional library access to get at the papers you need (Google Scholar helps here, but it's far from perfect), so large grants are less essential than in disciplines that need expensive laboratory equipment or travel to exotic locations.)

> 2) institutional library access to get at the papers you need (Google Scholar helps here, but it's far from perfect)

Really? At least in my fields (programming languages, networking) everyone has their articles on their homepage. You can find whatever you need by using regular Google or CiteSeer.

It turns out that this is very particular to the field. CS and math papers are easily available, but I was pretty shocked when I found an interesting cite to a linguistics paper on wikipedia, went to look it up, and discovered that there was no way for me to read the paper. :/

In related news, the arXiv model of making paper preprints available has great difficulty catching on in other fields because of fear among the scientists.

Even if you'd achieve critical mass, I think there's another problem. A fundamental difference with say StackOverflow, is that for a typical programming question there will be many people who, even if they don't know the answer, can distinguish a good from a bad answer. Most questions have a reasonably quickly verifiable answer, or they're about best practices.

Scientific publishing on the other hand, should always be on the cutting edge, and has endless niches. If you judge that sort of work in StackExchange-style, in the best case an expert shows up (the guy who Cell editors would hopefully have invited for the peer review anyway) and gives you a subtle argument for/against, and almost nobody can vote it up/down because they lack the background to grasp the subtle detail. In the worst case, a Nobel Price winner shows up and leaves an off-the-cuff heuristic criticism, and everybody votes it up because well, hey. And it would look like the crowd sourcing worked... except that he totally missed the subtler points.

Fair; StackExchange might not be the best model. I'd say public reviews of papers, but not crowdsourced ratings of reviews - rank reviews by researcher reputation instead, weighting that reputation by reputation in a given subfield, and maybe with a weighting boost if the paper in question cites the researcher's work.

Anecdotally, I've got a paper draft on ArXiv right now, which I sent to both the authors of the paper I based it on (who I got some really useful feedback from), and to a mailing list full of developers working on similar problems (who argued with me about typos my abstract didn't have) - this suggests that the people you cite might have better input into your paper than the general public.

Article is entirely about this site: https://onarbor.com/

I have a hard time taking this site seriously. Most popular project in the chemistry section seems to be a hand drawn picture of a cat. The entire site seems very focused on gigantic thumbnails instead of, you know, comments.

I file it under 'internet based funding agency'

The site just launched. Most content is still just test content. Please give it time and/or contribute to bringing content you like.

If you click the gigantic thumbnails, then whatever content is published, videos, music, ebooks, images, apps, will play. Reviews and Comments are two different things. Reviews of works are written by backers and commenting is restricted by review. Our reviews/comments model was inspired by Github issue tracking. We felt this was a fitting approach because Onarbor allows versioning of the works. Therefore, we wanted a way for the various reviews/comments to keep track of each version.

Fair enough. I'll check back in a few months.

Thanks. We'd very much appreciate that!

fascinating. Here is a question, outside of the publishing aspect, why would one go with onarbor (or experiment.com, even) instead of more mainstream avenues of funding such as crowdtilt, indiegogo, etc. which take a smaller cut?

The goal of the site was to combine something like stack-overflow with indie-gogo.

Onarbor differs considerably from other crowdfunding sites.

Key concepts and distinctions with existing platforms, crowdfunding or otherwise, include:

1. Blockchain: Onarbor uses Blockchain technology to provide proof of ownership and monetization of digital content in one ledger. This is a pioneering solution in how content creators (including journalists such as yourself!) stake claim for and fund their work. To learn more about this, we note monograph for inspiring us, http://www.monegraph.com.

2. Ad-free media: Due to their minuscule fees cryptocurrencies enable a new funding scale, where transactions can be true microfunding (significantly less than $0.01) or huge sums, millions of dollars, all with one button click. Onarbor takes advantage of this to propose an entirely new model of content monetization: instead of ad-supported content as utilized by Youtube, etc., one can pay a one-click, editable amount to instantly view content. Onarbor's mission is to abolish ads. Cryptocurrencies make this doable.

3. Multi-currency marketplace: That Onarbor allows payments in cryptocurrency and crypto-fiat conversion, e.g., have somebody fund you in Bitcoin and get paid out by Onarbor in USD, makes Onarbor the first marketplace on the internet to do so.

4. Collaborators: Kickstarters are presented by one person, whereas most works of merit are collaborations. Onarbor encourages/rewards designating your collaborators, people and organizations, who've contribute to your work. Onarbor is designed to graph onto your existing professional organizational structure where your funding, i.e., salary, and social/professional network are under one roof.

5. Reviews and Reputation building: Key to any publisher is having your work reviewed and reputation building. Onarbor enables anyone to review your work and to receive funding if those reviews are judged well by others. Therefore, if you aren't a creator but rather someone who can provide analysis, Onarbor can be lucrative and credibility building for you too. Reputation is built by both voting on works and reviews. Our model here is Stackoverflow. http://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

6. Real-time: Unlike Kickstarter, Onarbor allows playback and versioning of all works: documents, videos, music, images, files, and apps. Our model for versioning is Github (though we don't use Git because video files are huge). Having a UI which allows editing and playback on the same interface produces a dynamic and considerably easier experience than going back and forth between Kickstarter and Youtube for videos, Kickstarter and Soundcloud for music, etc. Onarbor is a real-time, one-stop shop.

7. Distributed: Onarbor is API-driven, which means that the onarbor site, https://onarbor.com, is only a simple demo of what people can build with our tools. Our inspiration for this is Facebook, whose developer-first approach led an unprecedented range of products (Pinterest, Spotify, Zynga, etc.) and redefined the concept of a social network. As an ecosystem of creativity, knowledge, and funding, Onarbor aims to redefine the concept of a university.

Are academics going to be sufficiently incentivized to do free online peer review for meaningless internet points à la StackOverflow? I have my doubts.

Academics already do their peer review for free. They don't even get internet points.

They get points from their peers. That's even more valuable to them.

That would be the same with this system.

Onarbor treats works and reviews the same. Both can be funded and voted on. This is like the HHMI-founded journal, eLife, or several other modern academic journals. Enabling fundable reviews is done to reward high quality reviewing and because we realize not everyone is a creator. Therefore, we wanted to offer more ways to participate in the network. Also, commenting threads are organized by review, which are tied to individual works. Our model for commenting on reviews is Github repositories and issue tracking: Onarbor: https://onarbor.com/review/35/fma-uoboros/chemistry-or-art Github: https://github.com/ummjackson/dogeapi-php/pull/11

I've gone through the (low quality) pictures offered at the front page and I still don't really get what the product is.

The site just launched and there is only one developer. It will improve. Onarbor is a publishing and funding platform.

"Traditional academic publishers hate him!"

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