Mission: BraidDAO is building a science collaboration platform to fix the science publishing, review, and funding system.
Stronger Together.
At braid we believe that the most powerful force behind human progress is human ideas. We believe the best ideas happen through powerful collaboration between independent thinkers. We believe that any idea — no matter how good or who came up with it — can still be improved.
That's why we're creating a platform for improving ideas — a platform where people can go to weave observations, insight, and reason together. A platform for anyone who wants to be a scientist, scholar, or simply curious.
The Problem with Science Publishing
Science is the systematic search to get ever closer to truth. Today, scientists use publishing papers to release their research results, seek feedback for improvement, and accelerate human progress.
However, they face a huge problem: Publishers who hoard prestige, time, and money. If a scientists wants to get published in a name-brand journal like Nature or Cell: they face a slow and expensive process.
Today, Publishers:
- Charge in the range of $10,000 for scientists to submit a paper to be uploaded to their website
- Can take months to send the paper out for review (to reviewers who do not get paid) and then the authors HAVE to respond to comments (even low-quality ones) or their paper will not be published
- Charge AGAIN for people to read the paper someone else wrote on their website
Tomorrow, Braid:
- Will enable scientists to upload papers for free
- Will create a fast, global network of reviewers and commenters to allow for rapid feedback and improvement
- Will never charge to access a paper because we believe in free, open information
But why would a Scientist use Braid over Nature?
The prestige of scientific journals comes from their historic reputation of having great scientists publish with them, not from the name and not from the publishing company.
We believe if scientists are provided with a sufficiently compelling alternative to money-hoarding publishers they will make the switch. Scientists don’t like these publishers. We are looking to have a network effect of scientists bringing other scientists into braid and publishing research.
We believe we can provide a fantastic user experience. We are going to enable scientists to do things they aren’t used to doing on the old, outdated websites publishers maintain.
For example, all science papers today get uploaded as PDFs. This is awful. PDFs are hard to read on your phone, hard for other scientists to edit or comment on, and a file format intended to be printed on paper.
Braid is a digital-first platform. We want to feel like using your favorite social media platform with the same level of collaboration as open source software. For Science.
We will enable scientists to easily share their favorite papers with others, leave collective comments, have a dialogue, and edit their papers right on our platform.
What about Funding?
First: Let us say, we don’t have it all figured out. Braid is a new platform and we will experiment to find solutions that enable science to remain credible, impartial, and not motivated by money.
We do believe there is a problem in how science gets funded today. Funding pools at universities can be small and highly competitive. Political in-fighting creates situations where peers have to push each other down to grab a bigger slice of the pie for themselves. On top of that, if you’re a scientist working outside the traditional university system it may not be possible for you to get funding at all.
We don’t believe credentials like degrees are needed for good science. Just good ideas, reason, and insight.
We want to make a platform where scientists can start research, post preliminary results as they go, and get funded by fans of their research. We want to enable Patreon, or Kickstarter type funding for science. We hope to attract not just science enthusiasts to fund research on our platform but large companies, foundations, and venture capital.
We know science is the source of innovation — that the great technology which we hold in our hands builds off what researchers found in labs. We know these researchers don’t usually make much money off the work they do. We believe they should.
How can I get involved?
If you believe in our mission to fix the problems in science, then know that we are actively looking for contributors to this project.
BraidDAO is an open group where anyone can join. We are in need of web developers, scientific thinkers, communicators, and anyone who shares our passion.
We have open tasks that anyone can grab and start working on and contributing to our mission.
To find out more, please join our discord: https://discord.gg/ZGfKmyMQAN
OR reach out to braidscience@pm.me
OR stop by an open onboarding meeting: Our weekly hour for people interested in joining the effort or onboarding to Braid. We can share what we're working on, ways to get involved, and answer any questions you have. We look forward to meeting wonderful people
Extra: Want to see where we started? https://showcase.ethglobal.com/web3jam/braid
Lastly, consider collecting one of our ‘Earliest Days’ NFT to financially show your support of our mission. We hope we can be worthy of your support and prove that in the quest for truth, we are stronger together