[Disclaimer] I have not worked in academia. This post is part of my process for organizing my thoughts as I learn about Open Science. If you have first-hand experience about these problems and would like to add more context or correct my misunderstandings, please share!

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Scientific publishing puts publicly-funded research behind private gatekeepers

Here’s how most scientific knowledge is created and shared right now: University research groups receive funding from government grants, they conduct research, and then publish the results in privately run journals (think Nature, Science). Once the article is published, anyone who wants to read the results (including the researchers that created the knowledge in the first place) have to pay those journals large subscription fees. The average person can’t get access to any of this publicly funded research because it’s owned by private companies and behind a paywall.

In the age of the internet, Wikipedia, GitHub, and open source software, and particularly to those of us working the technology, this treatment of knowledge feels wrong. Aaron Swartz famously tried to download JSTOR journal papers and make them available on the internet, leading to aggressive prosecution and his suicide. The problem is so bad that Harvard University Library complained in 2012 that it couldn’t afford to keep buying all the subscriptions anymore. Imagine what less well-funded institutions are facing.

There is an Open Science movement to make the process of research more open and make the results of the research more accessible. arXiv is a well-known example and there are other new Open Access journals that allow their contents to be freely redistributed.

Publish or Perish

Maybe this is just a problem of education. If we told more scientists about the current problems, they’ll start publishing their new research with Open Access journals. Unfortunately, researchers have a strong personal incentive to keep publishing with the current well known crop of journals – their career depends on it. Advancement, grants, and tenure, all the things that research scientists care about are heavily based on publication records. The goal is to publish as much as possible, in as prestigious a journal as possible. If these new Open Access journals aren’t considered prestigious in their research community, the best researchers won’t publish to it. In a sense, we would have to ask researchers to choose between advancing their careers, or upholding their ideals of making their work available to everyone.

What do the journals have to say about why they charge such high fees? The most common response is that they provide a valuable service in the form of peer review. Peer review has been established as a key part of the scientific process. Prospective papers are shared with other researchers in the field who provide feedback, comments, and validation. The journals essentially crowd-source the authentication of the research back to the research community. Oh, those peer reviewers? They’re unpaid. The service that journals directly provide is the infrastructure of soliciting and processing the feedback. This model actually make a lot of sense, it’s the community of the most informed that curates the quality of the content. The part that doesn’t make sense is the cost of the service.

Github for Science

This is actually a market rich enough to support the business case for a disruptive startup. The publishing market for STEM research is $19B. 42% of all articles are by published by the top three publishers: Reed Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley.

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One of the most interesting startups tackling this problem is Authorea. Their end goal is to make the underlying data more available, and they’re starting with improving the writing and editing process. They provide tools to embed data into papers, and tools to collaborate with others to edit papers. If it’s easy to make your data available while you’re writing the paper, maybe it’s not a big step to sharing it after you publish it. This is a smart way to get into the space by providing a service that researchers can see immediate value in (less painful process of writing technical papers).

Startup Idea

I think for a startup to actually make headway on the primary problem, they need to create a substitute for the value that journal papers provide right now: validation of research, distribution for research, and career prestige.

One way is to co-opt the current journal system by building on top of it. Let the current journal keep publishing the papers and keeping it behind their paywall. But create a better tool for discovering and discussing the research. Create something like RapGenius that has a page for each paper, linking to where the full text can be found. For articles that can be republished, make it available. Even for ones that can’t, allow researchers to annotate or comment on the research. Allow the actual writers of the paper host their data. Create trackbacks and other linking mechanisms connecting the bibliography. One of the ways papers become important is through how many other cite them.

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This would move the center of gravity to a publicly viewable site. Once this community is built, the distribution and prestige problems would be solved. From there it’s a short step to offering peer review this new community.

Further Readings

I started looking into this when reading Everything is Bullshit, but have tried to refer to the primary sources as much as possible in this post. Here are some other articles I found that were good, that didn’t belong anywhere in the body:

• http://marciovm.com/i-want-a-github-of-science/
• http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-future-of-science-2/
• https://github.com/blog/1840-improving-github-for-science

The main criticism of wearables is that it’s an solution in search of a problem. The following needs to be true for a “smartwatch” to make sense.

1. It needs to do something other than tell time
2. The thing it does needs to be short – faster than taking our phone out, unlocking it, and opening an app (5-10 seconds?)
3. The thing it does needs to happen enough times throughout the day to justify another device that needs to be charged and updated (5-10 times a day?)
4. Bonus points if the thing it does gets data from being physically attached to you

Current State of Affairs

Health and fitness fits these requirements. Fitbit, Jawbone, and Fuelband are all active, and providing value. That market was worth $238 million in 2013. That’s a great business for those involved, but it’s not big enough to be a game-changer the way the the iPod or iPhone was. Too many of us are lazy and don’t actually want to exercise more.

In search of a bigger market, Google’s Android Wear strategy has been to make the watch an interface to Google Now. That’s pretty smart, Google Now’s key value is providing information before you even know you need it. Google also takes advantage of their voice recognition to allow you to speak to the watch so it doesn’t need a keyboard.

The main reservation I have is that it requires the prospective buyer to trust Google Now. Trust that it will provide enough updates throughout the day, and trust that the updates it provides are relevant and valuable. I as the wearer don’t initiate many of these actions, the watch does.

The case for To-Do lists

The smartwatch needs one marquee interaction that I as the wearer initiate. That’s why the to-do list is perfect. It’s something small and fast. The whole purpose of jotting down a to-do is for it to happen quickly, and then not have to think about it again. These things arise regularly throughout the day:

• a new task that comes up during a meeting
• an idea you have when walking around that you don’t want to forget
• remember that you need to add something to your shopping list
• agreeing to meet someone but not wanting to go actually make a calendar event

In these use cases, the watch is more than a to-do list, it’s a personal assistant. This is what we had hoped Siri would be. You could tell it something on your mind, and not have to think about it again, and it would tell you about things you needed to know based on your earlier inputs.

Why hasn’t this happened yet?

If Google had Siri or Apple had Google Now, this would be obvious to either company. Why don’t they?

Benedict Evans is fond of saying that Google wants to make the hardware a dumb terminal to a smart cloud, and Apple wants to make the cloud plumbing to support native apps. I like this framework. Task lists feel like a small feature that that doesn’t take advantage of the Google firehose. Apple arguably doesn’t have the tech or the data to do Google Now properly. Throw into there the fact that Apple hasn’t opened Siri up to 3rd party devs, and you get a reasonable answer to why this hasn’t happened yet.

Google can wait on Evernote or Wunderlist to integrate to the Android Wear API, but for this feature to be part of the sell of the device, it really needs to be built in natively. To-do lists are also not easy, everyone has their own idea of what the proper workflow looks like. You really need an Apple level of design refinement to navigate a set of defaults that works well enough for everyone, and then open up the API to allow 3rd party apps to fill in the gaps.

Problems with this theory

I really wanted to show some big download numbers for task lists in the productivity app section of the app store. I remember them being strong both in the productivity section and overall on the app store when the app store first launched, but the current store is all communication apps and games.

That’s okay though. I’ll play the “change changer” card and assert that the ability to save tasks by talking to your wrist is a game changer. People have wanted this, and missed this, and just didn’t realize that they needed this interaction to be super-fast and voice activated.

Public Utility Idea: Spam filter for web content.

The current quality of online content suffers because of link-bait and other intentionally dishonest content that drives controversy. This content is rewarded because advertisers care about page views, not the quality of the response. An outraged visitor is just as profitable as a happy visitor. Facebook doesn’t have a dislike button. It weighs Comments and Likes. A terrible story that draws condemnation with tons of content is successful content.

I signed this White House petition and encourage you to share and do the same: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reclassify-internet-broadband-providers-common-carriers/4MrqLTlV

The FCC is proposing changes that lets Comcast charge Netflix more money to provide faster delivery of its content. That means Comcast gets to charge us users to access the internet, and also change internet companies to use the “fast lane” and get their content to us at good speeds. Netflix will probably survive, and just raise prices a bit. Same with the other big companies – Google, Facebook, Amazon – they will all silently pay the new fees, and life will go on.