Open Community Science: A Collaborative Research Paradigm

I: Open Community Science Platform Infrastructure and Incentive Mechanisms

Science itself is open and reliant on collaboration, with one of its fundamental principles being the advancement of human knowledge through the sharing of knowledge and experiences. With the rapid progress of science and the high specialization within disciplines, expertise within individual disciplines has become increasingly complex, making interdisciplinary collaboration crucial. This collaboration has shown tremendous power in the development of COVID-19 drugs, with multiple COVID-19 drugs developed within merely a year and a half of the virus's discovery, marking a miracle in the history of drug development. This successful case clearly demonstrates the potential and value of collaboration among scientists from different disciplines. However, most of the current research is still conducted independently by individual laboratories or involves limited collaboration between a few labs. Scientists in the same field often engage in competition rather than cooperation, and communication among scientists is mostly limited to sharing research results through journal articles. This model is evidently inefficient and insufficient to address the increasingly complex scientific problems. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a new research paradigm that encourages and promotes collaboration among scientists, especially for organized or targeted research on major scientific challenges.

To achieve this goal, we are actively working on proposing and exploring a distributed, self-organizing, collaborative research paradigm called 'Open Community Science,' similar to the collaborative nature of Wikipedia.

First and foremost, we need to establish an open, internet-based infrastructure that will serve as the core tool for scientists to communicate and collaborate. Functionalities similar to platforms such as Twitter, Slack, WeChat, and Wikipedia will be integrated and developed to create an international platform where scientists from around the world can engage in cooperation. This platform will not only serve as a means of information exchange but also support community collaboration management, collaborative research and development, protection, and sharing of research outcomes, among other functions.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, to ensure the efficiency and sustainability of collaboration, we need to establish a fair incentive distribution mechanism. Currently, scientists' incentives revolve around publishing articles, academic rankings, and research funding allocation. However, this single, opaque, and often unfair system has begun to hinder collaboration among scientists. To improve this situation, we can consider adopting a novel incentive distribution mechanism, similar to the concept of corporate equity, using digital tokens to quantitatively divide project ownership. Scientists and their affiliated institutions can earn points based on their contributions to the project. The project's earnings will be distributed based on the number of points. Individuals can build their academic reputation and research contributions by accumulating points from various projects. Furthermore, we can introduce rewards for result verification to encourage the community to replicate experiments, enhancing the reproducibility of science. Additionally, this new distribution mechanism directly links the benefits of research outcomes to individual scientists' rewards, which can facilitate the translation of research outcomes.

We believe on this platform, scientists can freely create sub-communities for any scientific problem, breaking it down into manageable tasks. Community members can complete tasks based on their backgrounds and expertise and receive corresponding point rewards. Within sub-communities, members can elect a sub-community committee to act as project managers, responsible for task allocation and point reward setting.

In summary, scientific collaboration is crucial for driving innovation and solving complex problems. To promote collaboration among scientists from different disciplines, it is necessary to establish an open internet platform and a fair incentive distribution mechanism.

Preprint

Preprint

Open Community Science: A Collaborative Research Paradigm