Episode description

Research is behind bars: paywalls and a closed peer-review process. You pay both to publish and to read published works. A small fraction of scientists are involved in peer review, creating a bottleneck and limiting the range of expertise that can improve rigor. Finally, publishing takes a long time, with the rapidly growing body of scientific literature needing to get through the peer-review bottleneck, stifling the innovative process of scientific discovery and application. Arcadia Science is using an open-science platform to encourage innovation and creative experimentation by reimagining what publishing science could be like – and they’re looking for people like you to rethink how you share your science in ways that are more rapid, rigorous, useful, and open. While their research sharing site displays the science coming from Arcadia, it is built upon an open-source platform, PubPub, that is accessible to all. On PubPub, other communities can publish discoverable and citable scientific information in useful ways – whether that be a method, data set, or synthesis of varied data more similar to research articles. Publishing early and often is encouraged to speed up the process of innovation. Who decides the utility and rigour of the work? Without a paywall and with the ability to openly engage, scientists with diverse expertise everywhere can use the information and comment publicly about their thoughts on its utility and rigour. Arcadia Science feels like a scientific social media. The co-founders Seemay Chou, Jed McCaleb and Prachee Avasthi are building an ecosystem to help scientists reimagine how we can make the publishing, researching and funding of science better.