The world is incredibly complex. And it is facing some unprecedented threats. There are many legacy subsystems that didn’t account for problems of this magnitude, nor the advanced digital age of the Internet. This is both a challenge, and an opportunity.
At the core of all progress lies our need for experimentation and innovation, and those are embodied within academia.
Academia has suffered as well, and is being characterized as “broken”, “dying” and “unfair”. Our very seed of progress’ rotten.
People can’t find and access research materials. Scholars aren’t getting paid for their work and their schedules oversubscribed, so holes appear where the quality of work pays the price - it remains unverified and some people abuse that. Trust is broken. There’s a feeling of injustice and wrongdoing. People are incentivized by decision-makers to adjust the results for shock factor, instead of truth. It seems that scholars spend most of the time struggling and fighting against tools, processes and institutions, instead of simply being enabled by them. Frustration brews. The whole thing cascades into disarray. There’s a crisis.
But, there is a new playground - the Internet. Tools built for it are able to scale incredibly fast, reach the most remote parts of the world and enable completely new possibilities and workflows, and are able to evolve at an incredible rate and to work for everyone at once. And we’ve completely underutilized it so far.
It is time to innovate.
I want to create “a place for science”. A company, a platform, and a community that work together to make science happen, whether by providing digital products, help and feedback, or just sharing knowledge and experience. I want to make it the first thing that comes to your mind when you mention something in regards to science and question yourself where to start from. I want researchers to have someone they can rely upon and that they can trust.
I plan to achieve this by building a suite of digital services and tools, under an umbrella of “Unfold Research”, starting with a publishing platform that introduces new metrics and voting system, and continuing with: rich editor, full peer review system, collaborative reference management, project funding and supervision, conference organization,… that are all integrated together, and create a seamless and pleasant experience for everyone involved and that grow over time.
With all these services connected, my grand goal is to integrate payments into the platform, that, from a multitude of income streams (subscriptions, donations, government, and private funding,...) distribute resources either proportionally to one’s contribution or with some specified criteria. With this, my plan is to completely disrupt the academic business model (how research gets funded and how scholars make their living), and really simplify the way science is being done, allowing people to focus on what they actually care about.
Incorrect business approach, lack of motivation/incentives, or insufficient technical innovation.
There’s a huge number of apps and services that simply copied the functionality from all the previous ones, with content that’s neither diverse nor of high quality, that offer no real reason for people to ever really consider them, change their habits, and invest the time to do migrations.
Without a real strategy on how to drive users to the platform and how to keep them there, projects are doomed to fail. The lack of funding for meta-academic projects didn’t help either.
We’ll be implementing more of “a startup mentality”, which I believe to be necessary to solve all three mentioned points.
We’ll be focused on making continuous iterations possible, that are supported by a reasonable strategy on how to make it through every single day or prolonged periods of development, all the while building towards the big vision.
Our business model gradually expands products (enabling new income streams) and thus the value offered to the users and includes things far beyond just an immediate, first product. The roadmap is purposefully designed to coordinate the technical innovation and new features (and the demand for extra resources it creates) with the acquisition strategy (new acquisition channels and expansion of the market that we can serve).
The first ~5 months will be spent on setting up the infrastructure required to power the platform and creating the front-end UI. Some of the core services include versioning of publications, file management, reporting system, basics of the voting system, linking system, search, and tagging. Together, these represent a simple, yet meaningful whole.
Next, we’ll be opening the platform to the users one niche at a time (instead of opening it publicly at once). Our goal is to completely satisfy that one group of users, and gather useful feedback and insights that will enable us to continuously improve and balance the platform, while still being able to maintain full control and focus.
By concentrating on only a small subset of academia at a time, we’ll be able to seed the platform with sufficient interesting content that will give users enough reason to come to the platform. By realizing the kind of additional and novel value they personally could get out of the platform, we expect users to start adding content themselves and connecting it together, giving them a reason to return and stay.
This gradual acquisition strategy is at the core of what will enable our platform to not die.
We’ll be starting with small, technically proficient niches (3d computer graphics, machine learning, bioinformatics,…) that will ease both us and users towards bigger and more challenging/demanding groups.
Over time, we’ll be adding new product features and keep expanding the user base.
We expect plenty of technical challenges, but all of the challenges will be actually of a social kind.
Beyond technical concreteness of implementations (such as that of multiple security layers to prevent malicious behavior, both at the tech level and social level, including abuse, spamming, misinformation, self-promotion, and plagiarism), the majority of our focus will actually be spent on balancing the new mechanics that we are trying to introduce, making it seems fair and truthful. The culture and sentiment that will be associated with our platform are extremely important to get “just right”, and to avoid repeating the mistakes of other services or academic publishers.
This is indeed the most difficult problem that we’ll be solving, and the one where most of our responsibility lies, and to help us with that we will invest heavily in communication with our users in order to learn from them how to adjust the platform so that it better aligns with expectations and desires on both sides, while still preserving the original intent.
As we expand, our challenges will also shift onto making the metrics from our platform uniquely recognized and trusted by the entire academia, as a new way to assess one’s expertise and contribution. This problem will require a lot of trust built over a lot of time, and is sentenced to gradual adoption, but we’d be able to help it by partnering with organizations that will endorse our efforts and implement them practically.
Building technical projects in the open offers obvious benefits, like the ability to receive external contributions and suggestions, but in our case, it’s more important what’s beyond that.
We’re working with a very prominent and old community, and we’re trying to alter some of its practices and habits that are in most cases more than a hundred years old. That represents a highly sensitive problem, and working in the open is a necessity in order to establish trust and begin working together on improving things. Additionally, we want not to fall back into the same state as it is now, and we also want our community to point out the mistakes that we’re making even before they happen, and they can do that only if they have insight in what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.
What we’re trying to do with a new publishing platform and new metrics is, basically - an experiment. And like for any other, we want to follow the guidelines of the very community that we’re working for and report back what we’ve tried, our results, and conclusions. My intent is to actually report our findings to the community in real-time, as they happen and as we become aware of them, so that we can collectively align the direction that we’re taking towards.
My goal is to create a technological platform that is in service of its community and not the other way round. And you cannot achieve that without being open.
Unfold Research