I'd rather publish these here than with Nature | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather publish these here than with Nature

onarbor.com

OP here. I'm a molecular biologist at Harvard and have published several times in Nature, Science, and Cell, premier journals in our field. Ask me anything.

I wish I had cottoned on to how interesting molecular biology is when I was in grade school. But as regards this outlet, I have two questions:

1. Is the tumblr-like format not a barrier to compared to the more typical presentation of Abstract, full paper and so on? I found the UI pretty unwieldy, but OTOH that's just a teething problem.

2. As a well-established resercher, you still mention the journals as the 'gold standard' of quality. Obviously up-and-coming researchers desperately want the recognition of being published in a prestigious forum like that in order to advance their careers. What do you think would be the 'tipping point' for publication in a new format journal like Onarbor to be sufficiently prestigious for citing on a resume, attracting funding and so forth?

It's a nice site, but I can't help a feeling of 'academics reinvent tumblr, hail it as the future of publishing.'

Great questions.

1. tumblr-like format: feeds are the most common UI and are standard for billions of people on the internet. Traditional academic publishing format are known to significantly less than 1 million people. Onarbor would rather satisfy the former.

2. "What do you think would be the 'tipping point' for publication in a new format". Onarbor devised the tipping point to be similar to what Stackoverflow (SO) is doing with Reputation for computer programmers (REF below). The reputation you earn on SO is replacing the C.V. in hiring decisions across silicon valley. Onarbor more or less replicates SO's Reputation system with the analogous intent to replace existing academia advancement mechanisms.

"It's a nice site, but I can't help a feeling of 'academics reinvent tumblr, hail it as the future of publishing.'"

Onarbor is publishing and funding in one site. So the real goal is to do away with Nature and the NIH at the same time. Try funding a work. Your experience will quickly diverge from that you've had on Tumblr.

ref: http://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

It's a great concept that deserves to succeed, and building the funding aspect in at the infrastructure level might make a big difference. I also like the deeper ambition o redefining the university - as an outsider to that system I just feel a bit skeptical by default.

I'll dig into it further and see what happens!

Why don't you guys (biologists) use the ArXiv like everybody else? http://arxiv.org/

see my response to user lvs

Hi untilHellbanned, Why post these publicly, vs having them be in private journals?

Being public helps the world. Being private helps nobody.

Why not publish with PLoS Biology?

see my response to user lvs

I don't get it. Are you just trying to get money from people who aren't qualified to critique your work? Publish in PLOS One if you really want to get something out.

No journal besides Onarbor gives you money to publish. In fact, most journals charge you thousands of dollars to publish (PLOS One charges $1,200). Onarbor is publishing and funding in one platform, there is no comparison with any journal.

Also, Onarbor enables infinite reviews. PLOS One and other journals have 2-3 reviewers, whom in most cases are your cronies who will accept your work no matter what. Traditional evaluation is broken and virtually no academics respect it. Onarbor easily 10X's the status quo of vetting work.

Onarbor is publishing and funding in one platform

Great pitch, but it's still just an attempt to end-run the funding process. There should indeed be systematic solutions to the current problems, but this attempt is just a recipe for funding snake oil.

Traditional evaluation is broken and virtually no academics respect it.

There's plenty to criticize about peer review and about the big journals, but to say "virtually no academics respect it" is just factually untrue.

"this attempt is just a recipe for funding snake oil."

Everything is snake oil and an end-run. Have you ever read Nature? Have you ever submitted a grant to the NIH?

""virtually no academics respect it" is just factually untrue." Virtually no reasonable academics respect it.

Read this, an interview of Sydney Brenner, no doubt one of the most important biologist ever. http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academ...

Everything is snake oil and an end-run.

It sounds to me like you're conceding the argument. I don't disagree with your sentiments about the quality of review, but manufacturing an outlet to completely sidestep peer review (the key word being "peer") does nothing to improve the situation. In fact, it runs directly counter to your stated ambitions.

I've already addressed peer review with you earlier in this thread. You need to look closer at the site.

Also, Onarbor devised reputation building to be similar to what Stackoverflow (SO) is doing with Reputation for computer programmers (REF below). The reputation you earn on SO is replacing the C.V. in hiring decisions across silicon valley. Onarbor more or less replicates SO's Reputation system with the analogous intent to replace existing academia advancement mechanisms.

ref: http://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

Isn't nearly all science funded by getting money from people unqualified to critique the work?

No. NSF, NIH, DARPA, NASA, and private foundations all have review systems in place to evaluate proposals. You can quibble with how they're evaluated or who precisely is writing the review, but they're all generally evaluated by qualified study sections.

They don't have the money though, they are just in charge of how it is distributed. The money for science comes mostly from people unqualified to professionally review the work. This is undeniable, otherwise stuff like CERN would not exist, as professional particle physicists are not personally that rich.

edit - I view this as an interesting experiment and I am glad that there are people testing out new methods like this. I am not immediately taken with the way it is presented and I do have reservations about the model, however I am deliberately withholding judgment for now and will watch this for a while and see if anything comes of it.

I don't think there is anything necessarily untoward about raising money directly from a research source, though it does raise interesting questions about policing charlatanry and keeping funding going for important research that may not be meme of the week, should it take off. And ultimately private individuals have always been able to help fund research, so in some senses it doesn't change that much, it just makes that aspect more blatant.

I don't get it. What is this about? You have to write up your results or else people outside of your specialty will not be able to appreciate your findings. Publish somewhere instead of just throwing up some figures.

I am a bioinformatician currently doing research. I don't really get this website. Is it a crowd funding website or a publisher? Or both? So the point is that you publish a proposal and people back it?

I think the site needs to be more explicit on its goals. The interface and design of the site also needs to step it up a bit to appeal to a wider audience.

"Is it a crowd funding website or a publisher? Or both?"

Both. Onarbor is publishing and funding in one platform. What specific about the design needs to be stepped up to appeal to a wider audience?

How does that work? So you publish a proposal, people back it, you get funding for your work, then you publish on the same site? They seem like two very different services. How are you synergizing the crowd funding aspect with the publishing aspect?

In terms of the interface:

- Too much white space in the main page makes it look like you just don't have enough content.

- Instead of the tour, "trying onarbor", I would explicitly describe what it is and its goals. A tour of something I vaguely understand just confuses me more.

- Using the iframes on the frontpage to display projects depends completely on having an appealing image which not all your projects will have. I would simplify that down to a thumbnail with text so you can display more content. Or a better format so you can provide both the image and description visibly.

- When you click on the iframe in the front page to go to the projects page, the whole browser window should go to the projects page, not just inside the iframe.

- Is there no link to browse projects from the front page?

Thanks for your questions.

"How does that work? So you publish a proposal, people back it, you get funding for your work, then you publish on the same site? They seem like two very different services. "

Onarbor is flexibly structured. It is up to the work creators to decide what/when to post.

"How are you synergizing the crowd funding aspect with the publishing aspect?"

The crowdfunding is that anyone can back a work and that Onarbor requires at least one person to back the work within the 1st week it is published. If nobody backs the work within one week, then the work creator has the option to self-back it to keep it live on the site.

"Too much white space in the main page makes it look like you just don't have enough content."

We don't have enough content yet but are looking for submissions :). We just launched last week.

"A tour of something I vaguely understand just confuses me more."

On the homepage, we can include a "Read more" link to reveal a longer description. That is a good suggestion. We tried to do that in the slideshow with the last slide by directing people to the help page, https://onarbor.com/help.

"Using the iframes... appealing image".

This was a toss-up for us. We wanted to show off that all the works could be embeds on any site (like a Youtube video but with payment buttons!).

"Is there no link to browse projects".

Another good suggestion. Onarbor is divided into sites, such as https://onarbor.com/sites/biology, where site-specific work is displayed. We will add a link on the homepage to browse sites.

A question about hype since I know almost nothing about biology;

Is this possible? - http://microfabricator.com/articles/view/id/538989659aad9d53...

Any kind of information has been successfully stored in bacteria (one example: [1]), so it should be possible, but not easy to get that information to another planet, especially since the human genome is much bigger than what we can currently store in bacteria. The human genome is about 3.2 gigabasepairs, a bacterial artificial chromosome can carry around 300 kilobasepairs, so you'd need quite a few of these.

The actual '3D printing' is still far from possible, but not impossible. We can synthesize DNA, but we can't synthesize bacteria (even though we now can make artificial bacteria, but these are based on already existing bacteria from which the DNA has been removed [2]).

Once we can synthesize bacteria we can go to bigger things like fungi, other animals, humans. I'd give it 100-200 years.

[1] http://www.ijcaonline.org/archives/volume69/number19/12083-8...

[2] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.253.ht...

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