Accelerating The Pace Of Scientific Research — Can ResearchHub Catalyse Meaningful Change?
What’s Coming Next For The Research Landscape
What Is ResearchHub?
Founded in 2020, the mission behind ResearchHub is to accelerate the pace of scientific research. Making a modern mobile and web application where people can collaborate on scientific research in a more efficient way, similar to what GitHub has done for software engineering. Researchers are able to publish articles (preprint or postprint) and discuss the findings in a completely open and accessible forum dedicated solely to the relevant article.
It is led by renowned tech entrepreneur Brian Armstrong and his co-founders Patrick Joyce and Kobe Attias.
Addressing A Broken Research Landscape
The problem ResearchHub is addressing is significant.
It can take 3–5 years today to go through the process of applying for funding, completing the research, submitting a paper to journals, having it reviewed, and finally getting it published.
The process of applying for and managing research funds is often criticised for being overly complicated and bureaucratic. This can result in significant amounts of time and resources being spent on administrative tasks rather than actual research, creating inefficiencies and frustrating researchers.
There’s a tendency for funds to be disproportionately allocated to trending or popular research areas. This can lead to underfunding of equally crucial but less high-profile fields, potentially slowing progress in diverse areas of medical research.
The highly competitive environment can encourage researchers to focus on projects that are more likely to secure funding, which might not always align with the most pressing research needs. This competition can also lead to an emphasis on producing quick, publishable results rather than engaging in long-term studies that might yield more significant insights.
While peer review is a cornerstone of maintaining quality and rigour in research funding, it can introduce biases. Reviewers may have conflicts of interest or may be influenced by their own research interests, which can affect the objectivity of the funding process.
Due to the competitive and results-oriented nature of funding, there’s a tendency to favour projects that promise immediate outcomes. This can discourage investment in basic science or in projects with longer timelines but the potential for groundbreaking discoveries.
There is a lack of transparency in how decisions are made and funds are allocated. Greater accountability would ensure that funding decisions are made based on merit and potential impact rather than on other factors.
New Incentive Structures
To incentivise users, ResearchHub issues tokens (ResearchCoin $RSC) that users can earn and transfer to one another by sharing, curating, and discussing topics within the platform.
Users can also transfer tokens to one another on the platform by creating “bounties” to incentivise other users to engage with their posts. Rewards for contributions are proportionate to how valuable the community perceives the actions to be — as measured by upvotes.
ResearchCoin is also linked to reputation on the platform — with reputation being measured as a user’s lifetime earnings of ResearchCoin minus erosion due to downvotes. Reputation is linked to certain privileges in the app, as well as a mechanism for moderation within the community.
This creates a circular network of researchers and funders that optimises the flow of information across the platform. This positive feedback loop makes research more dynamic and innovation faster.
Fostering Collaboration
One of the health sector’s biggest informational flaws is the lack of capacity for collaboration. Intra-organisational collaboration is slow and costly. ResearchHub more effectively consolidates the required information to make fast and effective decisions that enable organisations and individual researchers to compound their output and drive scientific development.
Simple, Intuitive Interface
The platform is designed to be easy to work with and discover scientific papers. Research topics and verticals are broken down into Hubs for easy navigation, discovery and dialogue between users. Existing platforms have poor interfaces which are difficult and timely to navigate effectively. ResearchHub’s ease of use makes it intuitive enough to excite researchers and facilitate an informational home.
Assessing Their Impact
The pursuit of parity and long-term supplantation of prestige with notable journals through effective financial and reputational rewards was always going to be a long game that century-old institutions would fight.
ResearchHub is currently experiencing solid growth as it attempts to lure researchers and publishers away from traditional academic and research settings. Competing head-on with new incentive structures isn’t easy given the entire career and funding dynamics are shaped around existing institutions. It seems the pursuit is currently ‘slowly but surely’ as more researchers see the opportunity and get to grips with a new style of financial and reputational rewards.
Efforts to open-source and decentralise scientific research aren’t new. BioRxiv and Arxiv have been platforms reduced regularly but most don’t gain the recognition and financial reward for their publication. The RSC token will be an important change mechanism but relies on broader and institutional adoption.
Opportunities Moving Forward
Reducing the education curve is vital to onboarding more researchers into this alternative research and publishing process. Brian Armstrong’s Coinbase has led the way in onboarding more people into the crypto movement and those lessons will be vital in expanding the ResearchHub audience.
Driving network effects is a compounding opportunity that if executed effectively in the coming years will ignite their peer-review system. This is how ResearchHub facilitates the credibility required to become an authority in the research field.
Moving quickly on new and exciting fields of research, capturing the conversation with effective incentives and facilitating lock-in will help take popularity away from legacy institutions and publications.
This unlocks a faster process of commercialisation that attracts innovators and investors alike. Getting a solution to market from effective research presents a significant opportunity to bring together research communities with businesses, compounding the demand for a more optimised development process.
