I guess I have never debated much about science here at hive, maybe I should be more active. My info states that I am a scientist, and yes, I am. More precisely, I have always loved science since school time, I got my undergrad diploma in Biology, and then I went through master and Ph.D. in Bioinformatics at FIOCRUZ in Brazil. I also had a PostDoc experience in bioinformatics ( a little bit hybrid as bioinformatics manager) in a cancer institute in Atlantic Canada. Now, I got a position as bioinformatician in the government. I had my undergrad degree in 2006, and I had my first internship in a lab around 2002/2003, so I can say that I am living in the academic world for about 20 years I guess, wow, I never stopped to think about that. During all this time as a student at different levels and professional I had many opportunities to discuss and understand how the academic world works. Of course, that in different countries is a little bit different but the skeleton is similar.
A little bit of background
I hope that post can help people that aren't in the field to understand a bit how academic schema works and also bring the discussion with some people that are in the same world as me. So any help in the comments to enrich the discussion is welcomed.
Above you can find a generic hierarchy schema of an academic institution/university. This works for any biology, physics, chemistry, anything. Also in the private and public sector as well. Essentially, an institution hires a principal investigator (P.I.) or a university hires a professor. The difference between the two titles is the responsibilities, mostly professor is more complex since this title requires giving classes, certain disciplines in the University. But anyways there is a pressure for what we call keeping the C.V. productive. The P.I. / Professor needs to keep running for grants, there are government grants and private grants, the variety depends of the country that the researcher is located. The amount of these grants will keep their projects running, and how big will be these projects. Lab experiments are expensive, such as chemical reagents and devices. There are devices reaching that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Usually, institutions and universities provide starting money for their employees. But still isn't enough for big projects. In order to get a grant reward, researchers dispute with each other regarding quality of projects that they submit, but also their C.V.'s content. When we are talking about C.V.'s maybe more than 70% of it depends on the quality and amount of publications. How to measure quality? Nowadays there is known name by us called "Impact Factor" (IF). The impact factor of a journal has math behind it. Mostly it counts how many times articles in the journal were cited at the total university of citations. Usually, an active researcher needs a couple of articles per year published in journals with IF bigger than 3.5. Big journals in the market have big IF, such as The New England Journal of Medicine (74.7), Nature (42.78), Science (41.84) [1]. So every researcher dreams of an article in these journals. Does an article published in journals means better quality than in a journal with IF 3.5 or lower? Most of the times, but not always. The COVID pandemic showed that, and big journals such as The lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine had to do retraction about published articles with misleading data [2].
How the process of article review works? Essentially the editorial board of the journal receives an article from an author, and it decides if it is good or bad for the journal, mainly if it covers the scope of the journal. So you can't publish an ants article in a physics journal for example. In this first filter, usually, the big journals discard thousands of papers. I think there is a lot of politics in this step in the big journals. Maybe 80% to pass in this project is depending on who you are and from which institute/country you come. Editors seeing a big name from MIT or Harvard University will start looking with different eyes when compared to a small university from an inner country in Africa or Asia for example. After the editorial board accepting the article, they send the article to at least 3 reviewers. those reviewers are invited and work voluntarily. This voluntary work is good also for our C.V. and it brings more neutrality to the revision. At this point, the reviewers will assess the introduction, the objective of the work, the design of the study, the novelty, and how the results are achieved. That will lead to accepting, major or minor revisions, or rejection. Usually is difficult to get an article accepted at first. A minor revision is already a victory, it means that you just need to fix some text content and minor figure corrections. Major revisions are something that could be big, such as the inclusion of new experiments and more content, it can be easy or difficult. After your article is accepted by all reviewers, than you need to PAY for the the article. You need to pay to the journal. For an article, Nature charges $11,000 USD. Smaller journals can charge something around 3,000 USD. There are a few free-to-publish journals, but they are few. In addition to that biggest journals charges for accessing to read them. Monthly membership in Nature costs around 100 USD. Usually, universities and institutions pay for the membership to access to read them. There are some open-access journals, like PLoS, but they still charge to publish articles.
So it is a system where to get more articles, you need to get more grants. Like the workflow below.
What hive can bring for the subject
Hive is a blog-based community that provides rewards for authors. Thus rewards are tokens that can be converted to USD. Each post the community judge, or curates. So why not scientific publications can be published here? The payments can be used to fund future experiments. HIVE tokens could be used to buy equipment and even hire personnel for the labs. But we still have some challenges. Maybe the biggest challenge is the peer-review problem. During the COVID pandemics, lots of scientific works were published in pre-print journals. Those a free published journals, with no peer-review system. So I could write anything and upload to a pre-print journal and anyone can access it to read and make their own judgment. At hive, we would face similar problems and we would need to solve them. Maybe with a specialized curation. Scientific articles would be targeted by specific curation, formed by other scientists, so this could tag articles that passed through this curation. So the user can access any scientific article, but he will see which of them were curated by this process.
Maybe one thing is to create at the same time as a scientific article, with technical specifications is a more outreach article. This could provide the author of the work with another type of reward, maybe bringing our work to the regular public is a challenge but also educating people about science.
With researchers publishing in a system where who will judge their work is the scientific community themselves and giving monetary return will avoid judgments by name and politics. This will provide excellent researchers with lots of potentials to grow.
Hope everyone enjoys the post!
