Every (scientific) observation matters
With the current crisis that Academia is witnessing; irreproducibility of scientific research, extravagant costs associated with publishing and accessing research, as well as the exigency for story telling, is the current scientific publishing system failing us?
In addition to acquiring expertise in a specific field of study, a researcher is expected to expand the knowledge of a particular discipline by discovering and pursuing a unique topic of scholarly research. The culmination of this process is the publication of discoveries in peer reviewed journals.
To do so, the scholar first posits a hypothesis, a testable prediction of what they think the results of a research study are likely to be.
Researchers generally base scientific hypotheses on previous observations that cannot satisfactorily be explained with existing theories. Naturally, the first step in the scientific research process is to confirm, or sometimes refute, through experimentation, those previous observations (replication data). This is then followed by the design and execution of a series of experiments, the outcome of which can either be supportive of that hypothesis (positive data) or contradictory to it (negative data).
In theory all of these “micro-discoveries” leading up to the conclusion of a particular project should be shared with the rest of the scientific community and the world. There are myriads of benefits to such an open science approach:
Benefits to the researcher include:
- Due credit for the all the work they’ve done
- More citations for their work
- Increases in the number of publications
- More exposure and leads to new collaborations
Benefits to the scientific community include:
- Savings in time and money spent repeating dead-end studies
- An incentive for more rigorous design of experiments and for the transparent reporting of results.
- Strengthening and solidifying initial observations through replication studies
- Possibility of the reuse and reinterpretation of data resulting in new lines of inquiry
Benefits to society include:
- Greater transparency which boosts the public’s faith in research
- Access to the fundamental units of research for those outside healthcare and academia
- Minimizing unnecessary public spending, as funding for repeat negative research is reduced.
- Faster and more efficient advancements in healthcare and drug discovery.
In practice, until recently, only a small fraction of scientific research is published. This is in large part due to a flawed and costly publishing system that prioritizes novelty and storytelling over scientific discoveries. However, the tide is turning. With new movements advocating for open science (incentivizing transparency), open access (allowing for free access to publications) and encouraging the publication of replication studies as well as negative data.
ScienceMatters (https://sciencematters.io/) is one of the early adopters of these movements. This next-generation online publishing platform, is dedicated solely to the publication of peer reviewed single observations. Be it in the form of a standalone, contradictory, confirmatory, follow up or novel observation, provided it is scientifically sound and robust (as judged blindly by expert reviewers), ScienceMatters will publish it.
This visionary startup is even planning on further improving and democratizing the scientific publishing process by leveraging the powers of blockchain technology. Blockchain has the capacity to open science and make research findings immutable, transparent and decentralized. To learn more about their upcoming project EUREKA visit (https://eurekatoken.io/).
