American science is reeling amidst a barrage of grant cancellations, funding delays, attacks on leading universities, cuts in Federal research staff, and the general devaluation of scientific expertise and empiricism in public life.
I'm looking forward to your thoughts on rapid implementation and deployment of the vision! Even more-so, looking forward to helping.
For what it's worth, there has been good movement on a stack/theory that involves dPID/CID, open repository knowledge graphs, drip/provenance funding, open impact algorithms/marketplaces, modularized & iterative publication/responsibilities in action, etc.. Labs are starting to emerge in this alternative system with relatively significant funding.
One thing I'm very curious about is how to interface these new processes with our existing legal infrastructure. How can we give the individuals who do the work greater agency in the endeavor -- researchers, data stewards, librarians, software engineers, IT providers, lab maintenance personnel, local communities. And how can we enable rapid deployment of initiatives (research itself, venture startups, and public good infrastructure development/maintenance) that fundraise, operate, complete, and disperse within the time it typically takes to get 501c3 approval?
Mass printing led to development of our current institutions. Seems like digital processes are poised to step in to the chaos we're faced with today.
Thanks for your work!
---
Here's a quick demo of a prototype for funding modularized, iterative, specialized research.
Definitely has been exciting to see new structures with new funding mechanisms emerge. All with more individual empowerment.
Seems like during this moment with a step change in technological advancement, there’s not a single industry that will remain untouched. Change, especially now, won’t happen in a vacuum, and the landscape will shift fluidly - even on the legal front I suspect.
But noting these dependencies is important as you point out, so that anyone willing to try something different can do so in a decentralized way that allows for more experimentation with fewer roadblocks. -PA
For decades, we’ve known what science needed yet instead of reimagining it, we just digitized its outdated forms. Totally aligned with this. The system wasn’t just disrupted it was already broken. Prestige-driven incentives, static PDFs, and opaque review pipelines have slowed meaningful progress for years. We’ve optimized for individual careers instead of collective outcomes. Now is the time to stop patching legacy workflows and start rebuilding from first principles.
We’ve been building a platform called Medetary an open, real-time workspace for collaborative medical research. Think of it as what you'd get if Notion and GitHub teamed up to solve publishing in medicine: seamless writing, structured peer review, data sharing, and one-click submission all in one transparent, versioned workflow.
We’re about 6 months into development and would love to connect with others thinking in this direction.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Curious to see where you’re at with this and where you’re headed. Like you, a lot of the solutions I see are tackling the pain points but are locally optimizing rather than rethinking what’s possible in this new era. -PA
Interesting preamble to what I am assuming would be hard actionable ideas. There wont be a panacea for what ails scientific endevour and I agree that a significant reform is needed. Every crises is an opportunity and it would be bad to let go of this untimely opportunity
Exponential growth in attendance at the annual meeting of research administrators began with the passage of Bayh Dole (I used to have a slide documenting this, but it's a long lost Kodachrome). Universities are suffering the fate of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, administrators devote themselves more to preserving administration than they do to advancing the mission of the institution. We now have an opportunity to rethink many things.
I'm looking forward to your thoughts on rapid implementation and deployment of the vision! Even more-so, looking forward to helping.
For what it's worth, there has been good movement on a stack/theory that involves dPID/CID, open repository knowledge graphs, drip/provenance funding, open impact algorithms/marketplaces, modularized & iterative publication/responsibilities in action, etc.. Labs are starting to emerge in this alternative system with relatively significant funding.
One thing I'm very curious about is how to interface these new processes with our existing legal infrastructure. How can we give the individuals who do the work greater agency in the endeavor -- researchers, data stewards, librarians, software engineers, IT providers, lab maintenance personnel, local communities. And how can we enable rapid deployment of initiatives (research itself, venture startups, and public good infrastructure development/maintenance) that fundraise, operate, complete, and disperse within the time it typically takes to get 501c3 approval?
Mass printing led to development of our current institutions. Seems like digital processes are poised to step in to the chaos we're faced with today.
Thanks for your work!
---
Here's a quick demo of a prototype for funding modularized, iterative, specialized research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdQkwbrChjc&list=PLC6C5WwdBL4GxcEbH5VwAvGxs5hdrdTFM&index=2
Definitely has been exciting to see new structures with new funding mechanisms emerge. All with more individual empowerment.
Seems like during this moment with a step change in technological advancement, there’s not a single industry that will remain untouched. Change, especially now, won’t happen in a vacuum, and the landscape will shift fluidly - even on the legal front I suspect.
But noting these dependencies is important as you point out, so that anyone willing to try something different can do so in a decentralized way that allows for more experimentation with fewer roadblocks. -PA
For decades, we’ve known what science needed yet instead of reimagining it, we just digitized its outdated forms. Totally aligned with this. The system wasn’t just disrupted it was already broken. Prestige-driven incentives, static PDFs, and opaque review pipelines have slowed meaningful progress for years. We’ve optimized for individual careers instead of collective outcomes. Now is the time to stop patching legacy workflows and start rebuilding from first principles.
We’ve been building a platform called Medetary an open, real-time workspace for collaborative medical research. Think of it as what you'd get if Notion and GitHub teamed up to solve publishing in medicine: seamless writing, structured peer review, data sharing, and one-click submission all in one transparent, versioned workflow.
We’re about 6 months into development and would love to connect with others thinking in this direction.
Please check us out here: https://medetary.com/
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Curious to see where you’re at with this and where you’re headed. Like you, a lot of the solutions I see are tackling the pain points but are locally optimizing rather than rethinking what’s possible in this new era. -PA
Interesting preamble to what I am assuming would be hard actionable ideas. There wont be a panacea for what ails scientific endevour and I agree that a significant reform is needed. Every crises is an opportunity and it would be bad to let go of this untimely opportunity
Exponential growth in attendance at the annual meeting of research administrators began with the passage of Bayh Dole (I used to have a slide documenting this, but it's a long lost Kodachrome). Universities are suffering the fate of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, administrators devote themselves more to preserving administration than they do to advancing the mission of the institution. We now have an opportunity to rethink many things.
This is a good manifesto but it desperately needs some examples and data.
sounds like they're about to do that in future deep dives, and this is just an intro for framing...
Yes. This is just the intro. We have A LOT to say about specific examples.