An open-source, scientific forum where anyone can earn an ERC-20 token for sharing, discussing, and curating academic research. ResearchHub's mission is to build a community and set of products focused on accelerating the pace of scientific research.
We are hiring a founding engineer to lead the development of ResearchHub's web/mobile applications, help build a world-class engineering team, and contribute to the product vision as a founding team member.
Our current tech stack includes Django, React, Solidity, and Postgres.
Thanks for all of these questions. I hope my answers are able to help. If you'd like - it would be great to connect to have a more in-depth conversation at some point. Feel free to reach out to [email protected] if want to chat!
1. Yes, RSC is 100% pre-mined and earmarked for distribution to the community, team, founders, and ResearchHub corporate entity. We plan to distribute about 5-6% of the total RSC supply per year to the community as rewards for posting science on the platform.
2. In the future, if we run out of RSC and need to add to the total supply the ResearchHub DAO will be able to vote to mint new tokens. There are two mechanisms at play that keep the DAO honest:
* An open source codebase - If the ResearchHub team ever goes rogue and fails to act as stewards of the community, the community will be able to fork our codebase and manage a new version of ResearchHub how they see fit. See the Steem vs. Hive example to see how open-sourcing can give community an option to exit: https://hackernoon.com/inside-trons-steem-takeover-attempt-a...
* RSC holding represent ownership in the DAO. For every coin held, an individual wallet gets one vote. This means that the biggest hodlers of RSC will have the most influence.
On the surface the concept of more coins = more influence might seem like a bad idea, but we believe that carefully distributing RSC into the hands of the scientists and community members who care the most about our mission will result in the best governance.
Regarding guarantees against the team dumping tokens - we currently have vesting smart contracts for employee token grants and would be open to enacting other measures to ensure a healthy market for RSC if requested by the community.
3. I wrote a little bit about this in another response. Let me copy and paste here:
The way coins are awarded to posts can change over time via a democratic process facilitated by a DAO. In theory, this could create the infrastructure for the scientific community to self-govern how their work is assessed and rewarded.
Perhaps a 1-10 peer review rating would provide a better signal than upvotes? Or maybe basic research deserves 1.5x rewards because it helps to fertilize the landscape of translational research. If the community wants to make changes to Researchhub's incentives, we will be able to iterate over time until we find a formula that properly encourages the behaviors that benefit science the most.
4. As of today RSC gives its holdlers the ability to vote in the ResearchHub DAO and participate in the governance of the network. Within ResearchHub you can tip users for their posts by "supporting" their content with RSC.
5. We’re currently building out a feature to help address this. Any scientist who has authored a paper shared within Researchhub will have a pot of RSC waiting for them upon sign up. It is in our best interest to properly credit reward the authors of manuscripts because in an ideal world they would have a larger influence in the ResearchHub DAO compared to the person who simply posted a link to their paper in our forum.
The way coins are awarded to posts can change over time via a democratic process facilitated by a DAO. In theory, this could create the infrastructure for the scientific community to self-govern how their work is assessed and rewarded.
Perhaps a 1-10 peer review rating would provide a better signal than upvotes? Or maybe basic research deserves 1.5x rewards because it helps to fertilize the landscape of translational research.
If the community wants to make changes to Researchhub's incentives, we will be able to iterate over time until we find a formula that properly encourages the behaviors that benefit science the most.
To speak to your example - if the v1 incentive structure encourages cheap/easy/meme science, we would be able to recognize this and make improvements to hopefully achieve better results.
This is an improvement over the current static system which values bibliometrics because it has the ability to adapt and improve over time.
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 [email protected]
I think your skepticism is warranted, and to be honest, is probably shared by the majority of academic scientists.
To give a little background - I'm the CSO of ResearchHub and I come from scientific background. After college I started a PhD program in molecular biology and I've worked in epigenetics and synthetic biology labs. I ended up dropping out after seeing how difficult it was to achieve success as an early-career scientists. A few random stories:
-A friend of mine was told to leave her PhD program with a masters degree because she was unable to replicate a famous result in her field. Three years after she left, the paper she was told to replicate was retracted.
It turns out that >50+% of research is unable to be replicated, so I'm sure this is not unique to her experience.
-A PhD student in biochemistry lab I rotated through was in his 9th year of the program (normal is 5-7), completely out of funding, sleeping on a friends couch, and paying for his experiments out of pocket just to get the publication he needed to graduate with a degree.
Academia is riddled with perverse bibliometric incentives that encourage researchers to partake in behaviors which hurt the ecosystem as a whole. For example, an article shared on HN a few days ago showed how irreproducible papers are cited 153x more than reproducible papers. This is because more interesting results are more likely to receive citations, but also less likely to replicate.
After I left my graduate program I was admitted to medical school. My institution was fantastic because they got med students into the hospital to interview patients during the first week of classes. Without typing a novel, many of our front-line therapies are surprisingly old and ineffective. The waste caused by a broken incentive structure for academic research is felt within clinical medicine.
You are absolutely right that arXiv, bioRxiv, and MedRxiv are fabulous projects that have pushed the culture of open science forward tremendously. Also, should out Open Science Framework - they are amazing.
While these tools help scholars share their work in the open, we hope that ResearchHub and ResearchCoin will help to fill a grab by creating new incentives that can help to loosen the grip of bibliometrics on a scientist's career prospects and funding decisions.
ResearchCoin was included because it allows our community to create a dynamic system for rewarding open scientific publishing/discussion that can change over time. In addition, the ResearchHub DAO to allows scientists to help govern how rewards are distributed. The admittedly quite lofty goal is to create a democratic and evidence-based incentive structure for science.
While it is possible that the cryptocurrency component will make it easy for some to dismiss ResearchHub, we believe crypto is an elegant solution to address some of the root problems in academia.
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.
Check out ResearchHub[1], it's a company founded by a tech billionaire that's trying to realign incentives in science
[1] - https://www.researchhub.com/