First of all, I'd like to express my gratitude to all you who manifested support for the Hive-Science initiative! Special thanks to @gtg for his very important support!
Since my introductory post, I learned (thanks to @gtg, what a fine lad!) about the PEvO project, initiated by @pharesim in 2016. I was very pleased to be in contact with him and learn that we share the idea (dream?) of using blockchain technology to try to make scientific communication more efficient, democratic and censorship-resistant. I invite you all to read the PEvo [Publish and Evaluate Onchain] whitepaper:
https://pharesim.me/pevo_whitepaper.pdf
It is with great pleasure I announce that @pharesim and I will join forces to try to make this goal a reality! It won't be easy, that's clear, but I'm hopeful that with resilience and force of will, slowly and steadily, we'll eventually succeed in offering a viable alternative to the highly detrimental, perhaps even parasitic, scientific communication model currently being enforced in academia.
For more info on PEvO, there's also this nice talk given at the 2016 SteemFest in Amsterdam:
WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS?
As I see it, we should now focus on two aspects:
Conscientise more scientists about the disadvantages and problems of the scientific communication model in current use (see my introductory post for a succinct listing) and how a blockchain like Hive can address these issues. To this end, we will:
a} introduce Hive to university students [more details about this in my next post, coming in a week or two];
b} offer a series of talks and workshops, to students, professors and the general community, about blockchain, Web3, Hive, and the vices of the established scientific publishing model;
c} publish (both on Hive as a pre-print, and in some regular scientific journal) a formal article revising the issues, problems and pains associated with the established scientific publishing model, and discuss how blockchain could be used to improve this situation.Build a frontend to allow for the efficient publication of scientific pre-prints and conduction of peer-review on Hive, everything done on-chain. As I see it, the main features such infrastructure will need, that current Hive frontends lack, are:
a} a very explicit and convenient way to track all versions of a given post, so that each version of a post is treated as a distinct publication (this is absolutely needed, to ensure immutability of the scientific record and to allow for efficient peer-review on Hive);
b} an efficient way to link posts, specifically thinking of structuring a peer-review process, so that all reviews conducted for a given publication can be easily listed (chronologically) and accessed by the readership.
In the future, we can imagine that specifically-tailored algorithms could be developed and applied to filter thrash / spam, and keep track of something like a "scientific reputation" in some way, which would be linked to a specific Hive account. There's a lot of other exciting and useful things that could be developed / added, please have a look at @pharesim's whitepaper; though I'd argue that the above discussed topics are the most urgent in order to allow for the publication of scientific pre-prints on Hive.
CAN WE EXPECT TO REPLACE IMPACT FACTOR ANYTIME SOON?
Realistically, no. Not for now, at least. This might be unknown to most people, but scientists are currently trapped in a very brutal type of rat race, where the motto "publish or perish" is truer than ever. It will take time before such corrupting system is weakened, and, in order for it to be replaced one day, we must have a viable, efficient alternative publication and evaluation platform / venue. Hence why I argue that we should focus on building an efficient and attractive platform (i.e., Hive frontend) for pre-print publication.
Pre-prints are already widely used by scientists, and their adoption is on the rise, especially because of the enormous delay an article typically suffers before final publication in a formal journal. In fact, there are many websites / platforms offering support for the publication of pre-prints (e.g., ResearchGate), but they are centralised and plagued with censorship (I known this from personal experience!), so they lack all the advantages that the use a blockchain like Hive can offer. Actually I think this is a niche Hive is extremely well poised to compete and win!
Publishing pre-prints on Hive would also make the peer-review more dynamic, meaningful and rewarding. High-quality, meritous articles and reviews would further benefit from Hive's rewarding system, which is an added plus. Finally, it should be highlighted, pre-prints published on Hive (or any other online platform, for the matter) absolutely don't impede the "formal" publication of the same work in a scientific journal. This is important so scientists are able to satisfy the scientometric requirements they are currently subject to.
And that's all for now, thanks for reading! If you are a scientist and would like to contribute to Hive-Science and PEvO, please let us hear from you! Let us know what features a Hive frontend tailored for scientific communication would need. And please help spreading the word!
Stay tuned for more, coming soon!
I really like the approach of starting out with a pre-print platform, it can organically evolve from there when a community formed around it.
Thanks so much to @gtg for connecting us, looking forward to develop this further!
That's a good start definitely!
Such a platform should however be made different from what already exists, otherwise there will be troubles to attract scientists. The question is what would this offer, compared with what already exists. To be concrete, I would like to understand why I should submit my preprints there instead of on the arxiv. This is a question that should be kept in mind when developing the platform.
Cheers!
I would love to help somehow the project to move forward by the way =)
Welcome onboard @gwajnberg!
we set up a telegram group for a start
https://t.me/+Fb4bCQTlqYRmY2Vk
That is something I have been thinking for a while, I even wrote a post some time ago about the potential of hive to have something like this! I have many colleagues who didn't see the potential of using hive and how it can be used for our work. For now it could be used as outreach, but also to add our official publication. Like Pharesim said in the comment, a pre-print is an amazing start, at least in my area people use a bit of pre-prints (like bioRxiv.) , especially before submitting to a journal with an impact factor.
Maybe have its own front end is interesting... so people would need to cite using this front end, just to keeps things a bit separated from other front ends...
Fully support
While I certainly support the censorship resistance the blockchain can enable, a cursory consideration of the problems facing science publishing is cautionary. More than half of published papers today are not reproducible. Through a variety of biases, funding from political sources demanding specific results that support policies sought by the funders, and means such as insuperable statistical methods, cherry picking data, to outright falsification of data that today plagues publishing, the problems science today faces are well characterized in the statement of Anthony Fauci that 'I am the science!'
IMG source - ScienceIntegrityDigest.com
As the above image from a peer reviewed and published paper in Frontiers shows, the use of stake to publish any drivel desirable has become a stake in the heart of scientific integrity.
Is there any reflection on how Hive is a pure plutocracy and utterly governed by stake? Is there any consideration to how more than 1M accounts of users that onboarded and began using Hive were driven off the platform by opinion flagging? How is any integrity to be attained when nowhere more than Hive is the noxious influence of stake and censorship by stake weighted flagging more facilitated and obvious?
Thanks!
Sir, you raise important concerns, which I will try to discuss in depth in a future post. At any rate, I envisage that the "scientific front-end" we want on Hive won't auto-conceal (i.e. censor) content merely because of downvotes. Upvotes and downvotes control the economic rewards that Hive as a social blockchain distributes, and as I understand there's no way around it. But as to visibility -- at blockchain level posts cannot be censored, and each front-end can have its own set of rules / algorithms to determine what should be hidden -- and here we need to be extremely careful as to make sure we won't have meritorious works being censored because of downvotes, ideology, popularity, etc. etc. Otherwise this whole idea comes to naught.
Science publishing is all about money. Grants flow to those that publish, and the ability to censor facts dispositive of ideologies, and interpose fake news, is perhaps the signal feature of the extant totalitarian technocratic tyranny being imposed globally. Any front end only rides on the base layer, and Hive is a pure plutocracy. You can prevent the greying out of posts in a front end, but you cannot eliminate flags that require nothing more than stake to fly.
Hive has capabilities latent within it that enable it to become a governance mechanism for voluntarist communities, both geographically localized and dispersed. However, the financialization of it's features have produced #trending and the previously mentioned user retention failure, perhaps the worst in the industry. No one supports eliminating the burgeoning censorship of published research that increasingly eliminates factual scientific information, even as history itself is being purged by scouring the internet of historical facts, and discouraging the publication of scientific fraud that today comprises the bulk of peer reviewed papers in even the most respected journals, just as Goolag's Gemini has been so deranged by it's training that it all but refuses to produce an image of a white man, and replaces historical actors with various flavors of racially preferred peoples, more than I, but the facility with which promotion and discouragement of content, including peer reviewed research, by nothing more than money will be a hazard you will need to navigate.
I hope to encourage you to succeed in this endeavor, and not misapprehend the real impediments to success as have so many marketing efforts before that have caused them to crash and burn without achieving anything they set out to do. Political ideologues control immense pools of capital, not only on Hive, but globally, and you will be sadly mistaken if you just assume they won't deploy it to suppress information on Hive. They have been since 2016, and aren't about to stop now.
Edit: hiding content behind a click is indeed censorship, but it is not the only form of censorship on Hive. The Canadian Truckers that protested Canada's tyrannical government suffered the seizure of the bank accounts. Financial encomiums encourage content authors, and financial deprivation discourages them. Censorship is any suppression of speech, and flags certainly constitute censorship. It is flags that have driven off ~1m Hive users since 2016, silencing all those voices that were once here posting content.
Why do you assume that votes (up- or down-, doesn't matter) by random internet users would even be shown on the front-end? Is there anything else but post-rewards on your mind when you think about hive?
I don't. I point out that front ends can display some or all votes, or not, can take action reflecting some or all votes, or not. But, they cannot shield content from votes up and down.
Censorship operates by any mechanism that affects creators. Whether double tapping to the back of the head, or sneering at them during company trust building exercises, and financial stimuli is a critically sensitive value to creators. I point out that Canada censored truckers honking in Canada to protest tyranny by seizing bank accounts of supporters of that protest that sent them money for maple syrup for their pancakes.
Whether or not the votes are displayed on the front end isn't material to whether research is censored when published to Hive. What matters is what creators, in this case scientific researchers, gain financially from publishing their research. Research that is contraindicated by specific ideologies will be flagged by ideologues on Hive, which is shown by >1M former users badmouthing Hive across the cryptosphere today.
That's what I said, and that is not regarding whether up or down votes are shown on front ends, but whether those votes incentivize or discourage publishing content financially.
To render research publishing subject to the influence of opinion flags will further compromise the integrity of researchers, not reduce the noxious influence of stake on scientific research. My point is that to benefit scientific research by securing researchers from censorship will require insulating them from the influence of ideologues that fly opinion flags on Hive, and front ends can't do that.
Edit: I neglected your second question.
I do not use Hive tokens as money, to insulate myself from censorship on Hive. The vast majority of users that came to the platform have abandoned it because they sought to use Hive tokens as money which they expected to receive as author rewards for content they published on Hive. When those rewards were flagged away by ideologues with large stakes on Hive, >1M of them left the platform angry that censorship afflicted them through that vector.
There are 3-4k users on Hive today, and they are resistant to that censorship. That is less than .5% of all users that came to Hive to publish content and receive author rewards. I do keep that in mind when I consider Hive as a platform and society of creators, as I am only here because I have resisted that censorship, and most people do not.
You sound like a broken record. We are not planning to incentivize scientists with hive rewards. We might even set a 100% beneficiary for the project. Our users will not see up- or downvotes, or even comments, by random hive users. If you're not a qualified scientist, you'll be invisible to them.
And, just for the record: There is no censorship on hive.
I stumbled into this after scrolling through my feed. Pharsim reblogged.
There will come a time when majority go to AI for answers. Unfortunately a lot of what it knows is locked behind closed doors while individuals can easily control what it releases to the public.
The solution is storing everything it knows into a blockchain like this.
I don't want to drag this out and explain how. It's not hard to figure out. I can just see how beneficial combining your plans and blockchain with AI will be down the road.
For that to be useful, AI would have to evolve out of the current stage of being a parrot who got raped by an infinite amount of monkeys.
LLMs only know what we tell them. And they need human input, or they break.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~is410/Papers/dementia_arxiv.pdf
Right. So when you have an infinite amount of monkeys writing science papers nonstop, injecting that data into a blockchain, AI can then use that for a brain. At that point it has a perfect memory that can't be manipulated by a king monkey that likes to control information and decide who hears what and how.
I know AI can't tell you today's news until humans publish it. It's expected to evolve but will never be able to create current events and discoveries. A social network like X has millions of people working for AI right now, volunteering their time to help create and train an AI brain, and they don't even know it. Some even pay X to do this work because they think check marks are shiny. Then the masters of X decide what their little robot can remember. Other networks and corporations are doing the same. It's a disaster in the making.
Talking to AI will replace search engines. That's what I meant when I said majority will go to AI for answers. So it would be beneficial if the answers are in a safe place.
Would be glad if this can eventually become a reality. I was in the discord server for a long time until it was closed down (or was it that I left?). Anyway, Pharesim and some other folks were the masterminds behind the idea, I was just trying to tag along and offer my supports where necessary. I'm cautiously optimistic.
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