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DeSci Mic 🎙️ An Open Conversation with ResearchHub
Recorded: Oct. 2, 2024 Duration: 0:55:40Space Recording
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Hey Erin, can you hear me?
Yes, welcome. can you hear me yes welcome super excited to have you on today tyler and to dive into everything
that's happening at research hub and might be happening in the future um should be like
super great combo today and love it's a follow-up from from some convos we were having a couple of weeks ago. So that's always fun.
Yeah. Likewise. Also super excited.
Amazing.
So I talked to a bunch of the Research Hub Foundation guys, but turns out they're actually
in a meeting right now. So the timing's not ideal for them, but I'm sure I'll catch them up later.
But I think there's going to be a couple
that'll join in the audience.
Like I think Edwin was planning on being here too.
Awesome. Wonderful.
Yeah, it's been super cool getting to know
some of the team over time
and just meeting them at different DCI conferences
or adjacently connected ones.
So I'd love to have them on hopefully a little bit later.
Totally.
Yeah, a lot of passionate people in DCI.
And I think like the problems in academia hit pretty deep,
like when you feel them on a one by one kind of level.
So it makes you pretty passionate to find a, you know, other people working on it.
Definitely. know other people working on it definitely and i feel like there are actually a really large number
of people in um in crypto and blockchain or at least adjacently watching the space uh that have
scientific types of backgrounds so even even more reason and and kind of drive to get involved and support the ecosystem.
Totally. Yeah, totally agree.
Cool. Well, I guess we have a couple people who have joined the space now so we can properly kick it off.
This Desai Mike episode is being hosted by myself, Erin McGinnis. We might have some of
the other co-hosts join later, and we'll be diving into Research Hub throughout the conversation
today, covering some different updates, discussing the future of peer review, the reproducibility
crisis, and then also opening up the conversation of different feedback on
Research Hub, a leader in the DSI ecosystem, and other ways to get involved within their platform
and kind of their whole ecosystem within the broader DSI conversation. So today we're speaking with Tyler, part of the Research
Hub team, and hopefully a few others will be joining the call later on today. I feel like
most people here are familiar with Research Hub, but would love for you to give maybe a brief overview of it or maybe some of the original story or mission of how Research Hub got started, if you have context on that.
Yeah, totally.
So Research Hub was founded in 2019 by Pat Joyce and Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase.
And it's kind of funny.
And it's kind of funny.
Basically, Patrick was in medical school at the time
and was really, you know, seeing the problems in academia.
And he was trying to start a company like this
and came across Brian's blog,
where Brian had actually written about, you know,
Research Hub and the mission of decentralized science
kind of beginning.
And the whole idea was to try and approach science
from the lens of software engineering,
where things happen on GitHub really, really fast, and you get really nice collaboration in the open without these kind
of barriers and gatekeeping.
And so the whole mission of Research Hub is to accelerate the pace of science so that
it's even exceeds software engineering.
So we're trying this in like a couple of different ways.
ways. Like one of the most unique things that we have on our platform is the incentive structure.
Like one of the most unique things that we have on our platform is the incentive structure.
So whenever you do things on Research Hub, like make a post or publish a paper or give an upvote,
you receive and distribute ResearchCoin. And so what this lets us do is kind of give the community
control over the incentives. So what this could look like in an end state is say there a particular
field has a ton of review papers and what they really need
is a lot of original research articles well with this reward algorithm it becomes very easy in the
future to tune it to say hey you know maybe the field of biomedical engineering should not really
reward these review papers as much but they should reward original research so that's like the
financial side and then what we're doing on the other side is also reputational, because it's kind of funny, but in academia, sometimes reputation matters more than monetary kind of compensation.
And the idea is like, they're really good people who do science, like in academia and in the industry. And what they're passionate mostly about is just getting to do the work that they want to do.
to do the work that they want to do. And so having a reputational benefit lets them do the work
because they're respected by their peers, it helps them progress in their institutions. So we're
trying to approach it from like, yes, the reputation matters in traditional systems,
but ideally, they'd also be compensated financially for their work, because it leads to
awesome stuff. And the example we always give is like CRISPR. There were like six really important
innovations before CRISPR that actually were like six really important innovations before
CRISPR that actually led to the development of this really awesome commercializable technology,
but the basic science wasn't rewarded. And, you know, like it only has a fraction of the citations.
So I think we can be like really creative about how we distribute this amongst like, you know,
all the layers of the scientific kind of stack. And then maybe one personal story too. So I was doing my PhD from
2018 to actually just this past December in biomedical engineering. And so like I saw all
this kind of issues in academia and it kind of gets swept under the rug. So I was always looking
for a solution and like had actually wanted to build something super similar to Research Hub.
We had even planned with a friend of mine that we were going to,
after our PhD, we were going to kind of take a break from research and build something very
similar. And I was driving in a car like on the way to vacation, listening to a Lex Friedman
podcast with Brian Armstrong. And they started talking about a Research Hub. And I was like,
man, that's crazy. Like I couldn't believe that someone else had thought of this idea,
but it proved to me like that the, you know, the concept and the problems in academia that I saw personally, were like very recognizable
by other people. So actually, it's funny, I called up Jeff and the guys at the foundation and Pat
immediately, like same day, as soon as I heard the podcast and joined Research Hub on the foundation
side, just started contributing, joined as an editor, and just really wanted to lend a hand.
And what that turned into is when I wrapped up my PhD in this past December, I joined
Research Hub Inc. full time.
So now I'm the chief of staff, kind of working between product, trying to onboard new users,
and just generally trying to build a product that actually helps scientists with the problems
they're facing.
Love that and love kind of all the stories and examples of so many of us in the space got into the roles we might be in now by just starting to contribute into that organization, providing value, and then that being kind of a major driver to be able to stick around longer and be a core part of the team. So if anyone
is listening in, maybe a little bit newer into the DeSite ecosystem, definitely take those first
steps. If you're interested in one of the projects, reach out to the people working on it and
just start contributing and providing value and really cool things can come from it.
One question I had as you were kind of flowing through the history and story of Research Hub
was right now there are a lot of people listening in who are building in DSI. Were there any kind of inflection points or
interesting findings along that path that really helped shape the direction that that research hub
is headed in now? Or maybe any different approaches or methods that you guys use as a team
to help keep moving forward as you're building out this whole vision?
Yeah, there's been a lot, honestly.
Like, I guess the one that's probably most important is just talking to the actual users.
This is like crazy beneficial because always in software development, you want to make
sure you're understanding like who is using your product.
What does it feel like to them that your product is actually doing?
And sometimes what it feels like it's doing is different than what you think it's doing.
So just getting a chance to like go boots on the ground, talk to the peer reviewers,
talk to the people creating the grants on the site, it actually helps a lot.
And it's actually the way we led to changing our reward algorithm like three or so times.
We saw, for example, the beginning we were we were rewarding
upvotes based on like your quote unquote research of reputation we found out like our reputation
score was pretty bad so we needed to change that and in doing so we kind of like changed the way
we were giving out research coin and we actually were able to change the behavior of researchers
on the website they went from putting out high quantities of really low quality posts
to low quantities of really high quality posts so it just kind of showed us that like when you listen to the users and you actually take their feedback, they'll give you better content and
they'll actually do better science as a result of it. Absolutely. I was reading a post shortly
before hopping on this call of an investor who's invested in over 300 startups just hammering home on the point that first-time founders generally focus on product and assume, distribution, and truly understanding how people
might be interacting or could potentially be interacting with what they're building. And
I think it's obvious that Research Hub is leaning into kind of the second approach to really get people to provide meaningful value on the platform and just how different shifts can
make a big difference in what that behavior ends up looking like.
Totally. And a big credit too to the foundation. Like we have a foundation of really dedicated
researchers who used to be in academia or like are currently still there and they actually go every day and they talk to peer reviewers so right now we have like i think 2 100 peer reviews
on the platform every single one is manually vetted by these researchers in the community
and they even host like i think three times a week they host a call with peer reviewers
where they'll actually hear like individual questions address their concerns and kind of
even walk them through like what is crypto like why is crypto even involved in this thing? And it's kind of interesting to see
like, they're actually onboarding traditional researchers who would have no inclination to
crypto at all. But when they see the use case that actually makes sense for them in science,
they're willing to kind of go the extra mile and like learn about it. So just just a big credit to
the foundation too. Definitely, definitely. And I think all of this is sitting on the bigger challenge or conversation
in science of some of the issues with the current broader peer review system. Would love for you to
kind of outline what some of those challenges are and also how Research Hub is starting to
address that in hopefully a newer or better type of way.
For sure. Yeah, so the way peer review works right now, if you're unfamiliar,
in academia you apply for a grant, you get a little bit of money to study some kind of special
disease or some research that's interesting to you. You work on it for between one to three years
for each individual project. And even longer, if you're like just a PhD student, then you'll spend
about six months writing up your paper. And once you're done writing up the paper, you send it out
to a journal. So what happens from there is they take between three to
12 months to get peer reviewers to look at your document and either say, hey, this is good to go.
That's like the 1% case. And then the 99% case is they say, you know, hey, this is like, you know,
could be better in this way. Or if they're really not feeling happy, they'll be like,
add machine learning to your algorithm and like change your project entirely. And what it becomes
is like a gatekeeping process, where you have to make it past these traditional people at the door in order to get your paper published.
And what we're seeing is, well, I guess just to back up, after that gets approved and you make your revisions, you know, it takes about a year.
Then you have to pay a really large article processing charge.
It's like an APC if you've heard of it.
And this on average is around $3,000.
And in the case of nature, biomedical engineering,
it's up to $13,000.
So you, the researcher, pay for your research.
And then you also pay, again, in order
to share your research, which is very different than the way
it's done in journalism, where you can be actually paid to
publish.
In science, you have to pay to publish.
So it's kind of like this weird paradigm.
And then even the consumer who like, you know, pays the tax dollars to get the research funded,
they actually have to pay as well to access some of these articles if the researcher doesn't pay
the hefty open access fee. And this is leading to like a lot of bad things in science. It biases
mostly for people in open access who have like high reputation and are a little more privileged in the amount of money they have.
And so the people that can't afford the open access fee, they don't publish open access.
And so this reduces the reproducibility of a lot of research.
There's a study in The Lancet a while ago.
I think it estimated it was like $180 billion in research funding was wasted due to irreproducible research. And this is because
like, if you do a foundational study, like something on amyloid beta plaque for Alzheimer's
disease, and it doesn't reproduce, if you don't find out for 10 years, then all the research that
was built in that original paper that might have been closed access is invalid. And the field not
only lost a ton of money, but a ton of time. So it's a big issue. And then I guess in general with peer
review too, we're seeing since it's a volunteer role, peer reviewers aren't paid. So if I go to
peer review for nature, even though they bring in $13,000, they don't actually pay me, the peer
reviewer, to do the work of vetting this paper. So there's this thing called peer reviewer fatigue,
where people like me, researchers don't really want to go do peer reviews because it takes between one to three days, like a minimum of eight solid focus hours in order to do a good peer review.
And there's no pay for it.
So it's really hard to get peer reviewers in the first place.
So a long-winded way of saying, like, the whole system there is, like, not really well optimized.
And Jeff just joined from the foundation. But what he's leading there with Malik and some of the other guys is a paid peer
review program, where basically what we're doing is we're testing out how the incentive financially
for peer reviewers affects like the turnaround time, the quality of the review, and then in
general, just the efficiency of the system. And so what they've shown is that peer reviewers are
willing to be paid in crypto $150
per peer review. It's a modest amount that like may go up over time. But it got our average time
to peer review down to nine days, a little under nine days from when the paper was sent to Research
Hub to when a fully finished peer review, like nature quality or higher was completed. And the
standards for peer review at Research Hub are very, very, very high.
You have to complete, I mean, maybe Jeff, you could speak to this too, but you have to complete a review on every section, every single figure, including the supplemental figures, which is
not common, or I don't even think it's done at very many journals at all, including Nature.
Amazing. Welcome, Jeff and Edwin. I would love for both of you to chime in on this,
because every time I hear you each talk on this, you have so much incredible insights
into some of the nuance of this whole system and how Research Hub is able to address some
of these challenges in a better way. So welcome.
Thank you. I think the—this is really short, but the thing to highlight also is that these peer reviews are not open, more than anything.
Tyler talked about a lot of things, but we can't verify the quality of the reviews in nature, et cetera.
So we can't say.
And, you know, that's a fundamental advantage that I think, even though it's outside of the peer review,
That's a fundamental advantage that I think, even though it's outside of the peer review,
the whole peer review is done right now, that over time people will realize at least some more reproducible research.
Yeah, and maybe if I could build on, and hi, everyone.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, one thing we can build on.
So we've been running this kind of paid peer review initiative.
We're calling it a peer review marketplace because there's a two-sided system here. But we've been running it now for like about a
year and kind of been through some ups and downs, a lot of changes to really optimize
kind of the best way to do this. And really, there's two things to optimize for. One is,
you know, quality is a tough thing. And I was just talking with someone from Stanford,
who's a director there for one of their like kind of science departments. And he was telling me the
word quality in some of these like assessments for the review report is a kind of, you know,
dicey one, because quality would kind of suggest that there's like ground truth and the peer reviewers are able to juxtapose the statements or the editors are able to assess the reviews and then the reviews, they'd have to have like a truth or a ground truth to juxtapose like kind of the statements against.
at least we can try to optimize for at ResearchHub is thoroughness of a review.
And so Tyler touched on this actually, which is like this set of stipulations that we put up there
where you have to go through, make a comment about each figure, whether that be a positive or, you
know, pro or a con about the figure, go through the supplementals and so on and so forth. And,
you know, we can't guarantee that the reviewer is going to catch
everything. But what we can try to do is maximize the ability for the thoroughness of the review.
And by having reviewers manually making sure they go through every figure, you kind of increase the
hit rate on them catching something. And it just holds them to a little bit of a higher standard.
So I think that's something that's very important for us to do. And one just holds them to a little bit of a higher standard. So I think that's something
that's very important for us to do. And one really cool thing that we've seen, and there's been a
couple cases of this, which is reviewers commenting on other reviewers and either kind of either
calling out something that they missed out missed on or making kind of some claim about a reviewer
being overly harsh or unnecessarily
critical about something. And I think this is really important because if anyone in the audience
here has gone through the kind of traditional peer review system, there's, you know, again,
pros and cons, but there's kind of a blinded set of three reviewers often on the other side.
And sometimes they make very kind of overzealous claims about what you're working on and what you're doing. Sometimes they suggest you, you know, cite a few specific papers, nudge, nudge,
for your revisions. And, you know, the accountability is not quite there because of
the blinding. So in the public, this is very much akin to if you were standing face to face
and there was a group of people in a room and people make a claim, you have to kind of defend that claim and other people
can come and like question that claim.
So you know, pros and cons again, but you know, with the open peer reviews as Edwin
mentioned, there's, it unlocks this ability for reviewer assessment of other reviewers
and scientific community assessment of the other reviewers as well too. And I think if we reframe it as auditing, it starts to make a lot more sense to the general
public, right? We have billions and billions of dollars going into research and there's no
auditing, whereas in every other sector of the economy, whether it's, you know, the stock market
companies that IPO, etc. There's a
required amount of transparency that is just missing in science. So we think the trade-offs
are quite worth it. Yeah, and the other thing you get too with these open peer reviews is
it's like traceability. Like if you go on GitHub and you look at someone's repository,
the way a peer review works in software engineering is someone visits your repository because they either found it
interesting or they wanted to use it, like very similar to research. And if they think there's a
problem with it, what they'll do is they'll open an issue. And an issue basically says, hey, I know
this code functions, but there's either this thing wrong with it that could be improved, or in a very
serious case, like a major revision on GitHub,
it would be, hey, this isn't working
because it's causing a bug here.
And then what you can get is a tree of collaboration,
where the peer reviewers become authors of sorts on GitHub
because they've actually had a contribution that
led to some better part of that work.
So I think that's a really cool future for research, too,
is if we can actually loop peer reviewers as some sort of author object or contributor at the least.
So that's been a really useful way to think about research
as a financialized GitHub for science.
I love that phrasing of it.
And I feel like people who have any experience using GitHub could see
an obvious opportunity for that to exist and the ability to see how research builds on top of one another,
how different modifications and experiments result in different types of findings.
So I'm personally super excited about how this might be able to unlock better kind of
progress forward in research overall, and also preventing people from doing the same
exact experiments again without insight into,
oh, that didn't work for these 10, 20 other labs who did the same thing, as well as that
reproducibility side of things, double checking that, oh, this experiment actually did work
and we can trust it fully. This is all so essential to the entire ecosystem.
And I know so many people listening in right now
have a scientific background as well.
In a little bit, we'll be opening up the conversation a bit more.
So if you have questions, top of mind,
kind of form those thoughts
and we'll bring you up in a couple minutes.
In the meantime, yeah Jeffrey go ahead. Yeah I just wanted to also add to like kind of this idea
that you know because in GitHub all of the kind of you know all the information is public, you have
public repositories, so people can actually come and appropriately audit.
And if anyone here is familiar with ZachXBT, he's kind of an anonymous account on Twitter.
But he goes through, and because blockchains are public ledgers, they actually have all the information and data publicly available.
And you can make derivative calculations and kind of assessments off of those things.
you know, make derivative calculations and kind of assessments off of those things.
So just having this open, accessible kind of base layer to be able to actually have transparent data, raw data that you can assess is like very, very, very important.
thing that I really like about DSI Labs is they're putting together like some of this like
like low-level infrastructure that houses all of this kind of raw data and if you think about it
like the peer reviewers if you want to make an assessment on how reproducible something actually
is or like you know finding any errors then you need to have that ground level raw data to be able
to work with.
Right now in science, that's not available.
And I think that's another big direction kind of D-Sci can head into is making sure those like kind of raw data and artifacts are available for the reviewer to be able to do the academic sleuthing or kind of auditing that they need, right? An auditor needs kind of the paperwork and like the ledger of information to work with. We're lacking that in science. So
that goes to Edwin's point of like, we kind of need auditors and reviewers are sort of like
auditors, but they're got one hand tied behind their back and they're handicapped because they
just don't have the raw data to work with.
So that's another direction I think a public ledger would be perfect at,
which is housing and storing it and making sure that that's public and immutable.
Absolutely. I always think it's wild how peer reviewers are conducting review without having access to that raw data the majority of
the time. And they're just like, yeah, these numbers exist. And there's so much more possibility
for actual proper analysis if access to that data could be available. And hopefully moving forward, we'll see more access to that
data be available, especially with the U.S. implementing some different rules around
publicly funded research needing to have that data be available, and hopefully other countries kind of leading that charge as well and driving that
forward. So that's such a good point. Would love to take a couple minutes based on kind of this
entire conversation we've had so far to talk about where Research Hub is continuing to head moving forward, what people can look forward to getting rolled out
on Research Hub, or maybe a recap of different features
that may have been available recently
that if everyone hasn't gone to check out Research Hub
or use it super recently, maybe they missed those updates. So
we'd love to cover some of those updates and future kind of announcements if we can get a
sneak peek. Totally. I'll do a quick breeze through of like our current feature set.
So from the beginning of this year, what we built was we started with a funding feature
where this lets anyone apply to raise some
crowdfunding with Research Hub. And since the beginning of the year, we've done, I think, 13
individual funding rounds where we funded PhD students, postdocs, and even professors
from universities like Harvard, Cornell, UNC Chapel Hill, as well as Donner's Institute and a
couple of other independent researchers. Then after we did funding, and actually maybe real quick on funding,
we actually just had our most recent one go live earlier this week.
This is a pre-registration by Guy Fincham, who's a world-leading researcher in breathwork.
And he's essentially studying if simple breathing techniques can be as effective
as something like a psilocybin therapy for both like consciousness as well as
some mental health measures. So he's got a really cool study. And the purpose of the funding feature
is that we start in the open from the very beginning part of research where researchers
will share this pre-registration. And this is basically an open access grant where the researcher
says, hey, here's the exact study I want to do. Here's why it's important. And I'm telling you in the open, because you can essentially peer review it ahead
of time. You can tell me before I waste time doing the research, whether I'm going in the
wrong direction, or if I have some fundamental error in the analysis of proposing. And then if
the community likes it, they can contribute research coin that they've earned on the platform
or purchased elsewhere to the funding round.
And so Guy is raising for about $50,000 right now.
And I believe he's like 25% funded so far.
And it just launched, I think, two days ago.
So definitely take a look at that.
Then after funding, we launched an improved search feature.
Where basically now it's like a little more modern the way you search for papers on a research hub.
And there's some nice autocomplete.
And what came with this is we also have a recommendation engine. So it's a machine
learning algorithm that basically learns you as a user on Research Hub, and it will provide you
papers and recommendations for bounties that are relevant to your expertise. And this gets really
good if you verify your identity and like tell us a little bit about the papers that you've written,
because then we know your exact field of research and can give you these like really nice opportunities.
Then after that, we did a little change to our reputation.
So a while ago, we had a reputation on Research Hub
that was mostly based on upvotes.
But the problem with that is that academics don't,
like most of their work isn't just in upvotes.
It's actually in publications, citations, and papers.
So we actually built a little bit of a feature
where you can import all of your papers automatically
for anything you've written.
We'll count the citations, and then we'll give you
a rating from tier one to tier four
for your expertise in any field.
We stratified across 256 research fields.
And this is provided by OpenAlex,
who does really nice data labeling on
all research fields and so then as a function of like you know what papers you've written
how many citations you have will also give you rewards on your publications so depending on how
open access uh how reproducible they are you'll receive different amounts of research coin so the
most reproducible paper is one that's open access has has open data, and was pre-registered.
And if you meet any of those criteria, you're eligible for like a reproducibility reward on your profile.
And so what came with this feature too is a totally revamped author profile,
where we want it to feel really good for you to be a researcher and to live on a research hub,
and to be able to show it off as part of your research portfolio.
So now it'll show badges of things you've done like peer reviews. It'll show your impact factor and some traditional
metrics, your publications, and then also your ranked expertise globally, not just on Research
Hub, but globally amongst researchers in your field. So that took us up to like August. And so
after that, what we're trying to do now is to focus more on peer reviews. The community has been doing a really, really awesome job
with pushing for peer reviews.
Like I said, they've done over 2,100.
And there's really not a great feature even on Research Hub
to do this.
So it's been pretty incredible to see
that people are actually adopting Research Hub for peer
reviews and having success writing them.
So we're trying to double down on that
and build preprints as a marketplace.
And this is very much in the early design phase, like super subject to change.
But we think there's something interesting about the dynamic between people who provide
peer reviews and then the people who need peer reviews.
So we don't know exactly what that's going to look like yet, but that's the early direction
we're kind of heading for the next month or so.
Amazing. I think that last point of what does that relationship between people who need peer review and people who can provide it and what does that look like within kind of a marketplace type framework is really interesting and also applicable to likely a lot of other people listening in,
just looking through some of the profiles of what people are building and needing to balance both sides of an equation
of different people participating in some of the scientific or DSI tooling that they might be building out.
scientific or de-sci tooling that they might be building out.
So I'll definitely be watching you guys as you keep evolving, moving forward.
Jeffrey or Edwin, do either of you have any other additions you want to highlight
or maybe pieces of what Tyler mentioned that you're particularly excited about?
Tyler mentioned that you're particularly excited about?
No, I think Tyler really nailed it with all the features.
I think the new reputation system on the platform,
I know Tyler went through it a bit quickly,
but I don't know.
I think it deserves a little extra justice.
It's a really cool way because one of the impacts, maybe one thing to build off of it is one, like, you know, Pat and Tyler and team did a really wonderful job kind of setting a framework for this reputation.
Because when you do come and verify your identity on the platform, you can import, you know, all the papers.
papers, it allows, as an example of what Tyler described, you know, if you have citations in
an immunology-based paper, you'd have, like, you know, you could be ranked, say, 40th percentile
in immunology. And you get put in these bins. And one way that this ties really well into the
platform is the ability to target funding opportunities to those people. So you can imagine
if I put up a bounty for a peer review, and, you know, if I was a imagine if I put up a bounty for a peer review and, you
know, if I was a journal, I put up a bounty for peer review and I said, hey, I need an expert to
do this, then the targeting system would say, hey, this paper or preprint is in an immunology field.
Let's blast out this notification to anybody who's in the, you know, 40th percentile and above in immunology. And one
of the big problems that journals and publishers have is, and Tyler touched on this right when I
joined, is they have a database of reviewers, but these reviewers go through something called
reviewer fatigue or exhaustion. And that's because the journal keeps going back to those same
reviewers saying, hey, please do these reviews, please do these reviews, and, you know, voluntarily.
And once they exhaust that database, it becomes very, very difficult for them to externally
acquire reviewers.
And so I think the reputation system allows for and unlocks a targeted notification feature,
which we do have on the platform. And that is a perfect way for people,
journals, publishers, anybody to come and target certain groups of people to go, for example,
get the right peer reviewer quickly to kind of unlock a bottleneck for them.
Completely. One thing that I've always thought was kind of absurd within the scientific ecosystem,
like there might be some people who would be absolutely incredible, like full-time peer
reviewers, and they have a really critical eye, have enough context about a specific domain, but there isn't the ability for them to
provide value in that type of way. Hitting back on what you guys were talking about earlier of
how in most systems currently, people aren't paid to conduct peer review. And then oftentimes the
people who are doing all these peer reviews, like they're some of the top researchers to have the right context in that domain. forward, but they feel maybe an obligation into the broader scientific ecosystem to be
contributing in this type of way, but it's just leading to broader burnout across the
whole space.
And so I'm really hopeful that what you guys are building and some of these different
models and systems will become the new standard for
the whole space because I think all of science and all of the world, I guess, at large is
suffering because of that. So super excited for all of these updates and where Research Hub is
at today in terms of how you've been able to decrease that time to peer review,
getting really high quality kind of reviews and revisions,
and also kind of rethinking these different incentive layers,
as well as what reputation can look like
and how that might be meaningful within the scientific community.
So with that, would love to open up the conversation to anyone listening in. If you have any questions or ideas for the Research Hub and Research Hub
Foundation team, please request the mic and we'll bring you up here. If it doesn't work right away,
Press the mic and we'll bring you up here.
If it doesn't work right away, request it again.
Sometimes Twitter is a bit spotty.
So we'd love to bring you up here
to be part of this conversation.
And that can hold true throughout the rest
of the call here today.
In the meantime, Tyler, I know when we were originally discussing this space, you had a few different requests for feedback on Research Hub overall. So if you want
to tee any of that up, feel free to do so. Yeah. In general, feedback is a gift and that's how we
treat it. So we get a lot of
feedback from peer reviewers and like, you know, scientists on the platform, but as people like,
who may not be scientists, or maybe you're just not on the platform, I'd also just love to hear
if you have feedback for Research Hub. Like maybe there's things that we could be doing like socially
or just from the outside view that, you know, we're not aware of. So any feedback is a gift
and like, we'd love to talk about it.
Amazing. And I'm sure if people have thoughts that they're, they're kind of thinking on beyond this, they can reach out and give you those as well. While people might be thinking on their
questions or yeah,
is there a good way for people to reach out with any type of feedback?
Yeah, we're available in most places.
So most common that we see is discord.
We also answer LinkedIn super fast and then obviously Twitter DMs too.
So whichever one you're comfortable with.
And I don't know if it's listed somewhere, but also email is totally fine.
So any way that is best for you guys to reach us, we'll find a way to respond.
I think Crypto Shrimp had a question.
Maybe we can bring him to the stage.
Awesome.
Thanks for noticing that.
I just invited you up.
Hopefully that can go through. Well we have some more
questions kind of people are thinking on what are the best ways to get involved
with Research Hub? Maybe if somebody hasn't been super engaged on it yet, what
are different opportunities that people might
be able to get involved?
Yeah, I'll speak for the platform side.
We'd love to have you guys come on the platform and write peer reviews, publish papers through
us, and just generally discuss science.
And if you're looking for funding, we always welcome new applications for funding rounds
in the funding tab.
And then I think the most opportunities are probably on the foundation side with Jeff.
So maybe Jeff, I'll let you talk to the opportunities there.
Yeah, I mean, outside of what Tyler said around just like engaging on the platform, and you
know, I'd obviously promote like, come do peer review.
I know peer review is kind of a heavy lift, you know, especially if everyone has their
full time jobs already. So any form of engagement on the platform, I think would be
great. The feedback from that would be wonderful. From our end, we are actually really looking for,
so we're starting to scale up our editor program a little bit more. It's been on pause for a little
bit.
But now with kind of the increased demand in the peer reviews, we have to have a kind of commensurate increase with our editor program. And there's a couple fields we're particularly
deficient in that we're actively looking for currently. So if you or someone you know are in
kind of the bioinformatics, biostatistics side of things. We're very aggressively and
actively looking for people right now. And the reason for this is maybe a little sneak peek is
we might have ourselves our first journal that's going to plug in and leverage our peer review
system, which, and they're a very kind of large data set forward journal. And so we're looking for that currently.
And then the other one would be like just broadly a chemistry editor.
So if that fits anyone's skill set here in the audience,
or if you know somebody you'd recommend,
then please do reach out to me or Tyler or anybody else,
and we can get something going.
Amazing.
Love that little sneak peek
of what might be coming
on the journal side of things
and how that might just be able
to expand some of the efforts
you guys are already pushing forward.
Awesome.
Just creating another prompt
for anyone listening in to feel free to request
some mic. If you can't speak right now on audio you can also drop a comment down below or any
questions down there and we can read those off to discuss that as well.
to discuss that as well.
Cool, looks like we have one request,
adding you up now.
Hopefully.
Also, it generally works better on phones.
So if you are trying to request to come up,
switch over to a mobile device
and we'll be able to add you up more easily.
Awesome, welcome.
If you have a question or comment, please share.
Hello? hello emske can you hear us hello yes can you hear me wonderful yes welcome thanks uh yeah so my name is rick sheridan i run this research venture called Emsky Phytochem. Thanks for hosting this. And I
had a question for Research Hub regarding just maybe as much about future outlook as about
past decisions made regarding the peer review concept. So I've seen that for peer review,
there's still the kind of credentialism side of, okay, you are, you know, you have a PhD in X
domain. And I think that makes a lot of sense. And I guess I, do you see scope for building out
almost maybe at least like a second tier or maybe at least a two tier system of sorts where
non kind of credential domain, but either self styled
or otherwise domain experts, people who are very passionate about a subject can come in
and offer peer review to a paper they're interested in, or maybe to benefit from a peer bounty or maybe like a second tier peer bounty or something to be able to
incentivize their reviewing into a topic and that also might help increase the pool of reviewers
um how do you think about that
yeah i'll throw some ideas and i think jeff probably has his head best around this but like from the
product side it's it's actually open.
So you can go and share a peer review,
whether through the peer review tab
or through inline comments
without having to have any credentials at all.
That being said, I think it does just the culture of academia
and the users as well.
They do respect somebody that has a little bit more reputation
than someone who doesn't.
So the way in which we kind of tried to amend that
is if you want to contribute to your reputation on Research
Hub and you don't have academic papers,
just doing content on Research Hub,
you'll actually gradually build reputation,
comparable to having publications over time
just by doing regular comments.
So it is open access.
And then also, you can build your reputation over time.
But curious what Jeff thinks too, because I think there's a couple of ways that we've
talked about this.
We shouldn't forget that upvotes are also a way for financially compensating people.
So I mean, while you'll get probably more on the reputation side, generally speaking,
if you write a very good peer review and you don't have that background, you can still get, you know, weighted up votes from people with higher reputations and
that could give you more research coin as well as a higher reputation. Totally. And there's
actually a really good culture I should mention about tipping on Research Hub. So we do value
like high quality content, even if it's not from a traditionally credentialed person,
like they typically will receive also a pretty good sum of tips.
Okay, thanks for articulating that.
Yeah, and I guess beyond what Tyler said, which is exactly what I was about to say,
I would say that we have also this idea, and we were dabbling with it initially earlier on, which is, and
bioarchive kind of demarcates this, but this idea, this idea of like more of like a community
review versus like a peer review.
Uh, and so that goes hand in hand with like, we're not, we allow everything to be out in
the open.
So all of the peer reviews, regardless of your credential, you could still do a review.
It could be more akin to like a community review. But then, you know, if you receive kind of
scientific community upvotes and that curates and bubbles it to the surface and to the top,
then, you know, you're still able to, again, build up reputation like that. And then your
reputation score and your profile would say, hey, you know, if you did a peer review and it was a wonderful peer review and you got a ton of upvotes in an immunology paper, your immunology reputation starts building and you can actually accumulate this kind of alternative reputation score that helps you kind of establish a foothold in that field, even though maybe your PhD is not there or you don't have a PhD.
maybe your PhD is not there or you don't have a PhD. So definitely being able to, anybody can
peer, you can go on there and peer review. It's just up to whatever journal that puts up the
bounty or the foundation's editors to decide, like, is this a review that's quality and we'll
receive the compensation for it. Okay. Thanks for that. I didn't realize it was sort of the journal,
participating journal driven rather than platform driven, the policy. So that helps to understand. Thanks.
Thanks for coming up here.
If anyone else has some similar types of comments adding into the broader conversation today,
we'd love to have you come up here as well.
Maria, I know I see you in the audience and you have some experience on the publishing side of things as well.
CryptoShrimp, not sure if you're able to join in now.
Cool. In the meantime, while we have you three up here as speakers,
would love to hear any other topics that might be super top of mind for you right now across either the
broader DeSight ecosystem, maybe some broader trends on like science Twitter
that seems to be heading outside of kind of its typical bubble or any other
questions that you guys are constantly coming back to,
to drive how you keep moving forward.
I guess like a light trend I've noticed is I feel like I've seen more people,
and this might just be the recommendation engine getting me,
but I feel like I've seen more people in academia complain about funding
and about peer review.
So I don't know if it's, yeah, I can't tell if it's a real phenomena
or just the engine,
but it does feel like people are feeling the pain a little more socially.
I completely agree.
I feel like my whole feed is filled with that, but I also don't know if that's because I
just keep engaging with them.
So the feed is funneling it to me.
Yeah, exactly. And I guess like one thing to bring up that I didn't mention is one of the
things we're doing at Research Hub really recently is we just started streaming all like 100% of all
new preprints and all new publications will be streamed directly to Research Hub. This is actually
very different than what we've done in the past of people uploading PDFs
and kind of going one by one.
I just wanted to throw that out there in case
that was something that deterred users in the past.
Moving forward, all the papers will be streamed directly
to the site.
Sorry, that was kind of tangential,
but wanted to bring it up.
Awesome.
I'm excited to see how that plays out as more people submit all of those preprints.
Jeffrey or Edwin, are there any other trends kind of either in the broader science or DSi space that are top of mind for each of you right now?
top of mind for each of you right now?
Not beyond what you both said, which is I'm also not sure if my, like, if the algorithm
that is feeding me information on Twitter and LinkedIn is just showing me a bunch of
people angry at peer review.
But I do definitely see a ton more of that.
Just people who are just feel kind of disenfranchised with the peer review system.
And it kind of makes our job a little bit easier because it's hard to sell something new to people who already have something working for them.
It's a lot easier to sell something new for people who hate the way that it's being done right now.
people who hate the way that it's being done right now. So it definitely makes the barrier
of entry a little bit easier for the peer reviewers to come try something different on Research Hub.
Nothing on my end.
Amazing. Well, just a few recaps for anyone that might have joined in in the past couple minutes.
There are some really exciting updates happening at Research Hub, so definitely go log back
into the platform if you haven't already.
Engage with the foundation as well.
Submit a preprint.
Participate in peer review and really engage with this whole system that they're
building. And if you missed the beginning part, they provided a lot of great context and background
on what's happening in the space overall and why there's such an immediate and kind of desperate need for better incentive systems and the peer
review system overall and more connectivity between research that is being done by individual
researchers and being able to kind of follow those threads in a more meaningful way. So I'm super
excited for everything that you guys are all doing and appreciate the time you took today to come on here.
If anyone listening in has more thoughts for them, definitely reach out.
Reach out to the team and get involved.
That's how the whole space is able to move forward is through that collaboration and feedback and connection.
And it really is so
important. With that, really looking forward to seeing everyone back here next week at 4 p.m. UTC,
12 p.m. Eastern Time for another conversation on DSI. We'll be highlighting another emerging project in the space. And if you are working on something
or you have a topic or theme that you think we need to have a discussion on as a whole community
or maybe questions you have that you want to pose out into the larger ecosystem, please reach out
either to the DCI Mike account here, myself, Aaron
McGinnis, my profile's down below, Crypto Shrimp, he's one of the other co-hosts, or join our
Telegram group and we'll be able to engage with you there. So see you back here next week and all
the weeks moving forward, 4 p.m. UTC every Wednesday. Thanks so much, Research Hub team, Tyler, Jeffrey, Edwin.
And really excited to see where you guys keep going moving forward.
Yeah, and thank you for hosting, too.
This is honestly a lot of fun.
It's good to have these conversations.
Yes, hope to see you all back in future convos, too.
For sure.
Take care.
Bye everyone.
Bye. Thank you.
