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About ResearchHub

Our Mission is to Accelerate the Pace of Scientific Research.

We Believe Scientific Research Should Be:

Accessible to everyone

The scientific record is too important to be hidden behind paywalls and in ivory towers. ResearchHub is accessible to everybody, everywhere, with no content residing behind paywalls and no costs to participate. Summaries are written in plain English to improve accessibility.

Collaborative

Academic research is too siloed today. ResearchHub encourages academics and non-academics alike to interact in a public and collaborative manner. An incentive for such behavior is provided in the form of ResearchCoin.

Efficient

It can take 3-5 years today to go through the process of applying for funding, completing the research, submitting a paper to journals, having it reviewed, and finally getting it published. We believe research could be completed at least one order of magnitude more efficiently.

A GitHub For Science

ResearchHub's mission is to accelerate the pace of scientific research. Our goal is to make a modern mobile and web application where people can collaborate on scientific research in a more efficient way, similar to what GitHub has done for software engineering. Researchers should be able to publish articles (preprint or postprint) and discuss the findings in a completely open and accessible forum dedicated solely to the relevant article.

"Hubs" as an Alternative to Journals

Within the ResearchHub platform, research papers are stored and grouped in ‘Hubs’ by area of research. Individual Hubs will essentially act as live journals within focused areas, within highly upvoted posts. (i.e the paper and its associated summary and discussion) moving to the top of each Hub.

ResearchCoin

To help bring this nascent community together and incentivize contribution to the platform, a newly created ERC20 token, ResearchCoin (RSC), has been created. To incentivize users, ResearchHub issues tokens that users can earn and transfer to one another by sharing, curating, and discussing topics within the platform. Users can also transfer tokens to one another on the platform by creating “bounties” to incentivize other users to engage with their post. Rewards for contributions are proportionate to how valuable the community perceives the actions to be - as measured by upvotes. ResearchCoin is also linked to reputation on the platform--with reputation being mesaured as a user's lifetime earnings of ResearchCoin minus erosion due to downvotes. Reputation is linked to certain privileges in the app, as well as a mechanism for moderation within the community. Further details about ResearchCoin can also be found on the ResearchHub docs page page.

Frequently Asked Questions

- Is content created on ResearchHub open?

Yes. The scientific record is too important to be hidden behind paywalls. Science should be open, not only for reading, but also for reusing.

That's why user contributions to ResearchHub are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). This license allows anyone to reuse the content for any purpose, as long as attribution is provided. We consider a hyperlink or URL back to the source page on ResearchHub sufficient attribution.

The CC BY license is the gold standard of open licenses for scholarly content. It is used by publishers such as PLOS, eLife, Distill, and BMC. By choosing CC BY, ResearchHub ensures user content can be reused to further science, by way of text mining, sharing, translation, and many other forms of reuse. This sets ResearchHub apart from other places to discuss science, like ResearchGate or Reddit, which do not apply an open license to all user-contributed content.

- What papers can I legally upload to ResearchHub?

Users can create a ResearchHub page for any paper, allowing for summary and discussion. However, due to copyright, only certain papers are eligible for fulltext PDF upload. Specifically, please only upload fulltexts of papers released under one of the following open licenses: CC BY or CC0.

To determine whether an article is released under one of these licenses, check for any text in the PDF stating a license or refer to the webpage where you downloaded the PDF. If you are the author of a paper and would like to upload the fulltext to ResearchHub, apply a supported license to the paper at an existing publicly available location. In other words, PDFs uploaded to ResearchHub should be available elsewhere on the web with a supported license. We do not currently publish original articles that are not available elsewhere.

Disappointed that you cannot upload a paper's PDF due to copyright? We are too. While open access publishing is growing in popularity, many papers are still published in toll access journals without open licenses. We can change this by encouraging scientists to publish in open access journals and use platforms like ResearchHub that remove legal barriers from science.

- Who created this site?

ResearchHub is being developed by a small team of passionate founders working in San Francisco, CA. The idea for the site was initially proposed in this blog post.

- How can I help?

The easiest way to help the community grow is to sign in and start contributing content. 1. Sign in Create your account in just a few clicks, using Google Sign In. 2. Upload a paper Is there a research paper you thought was particularly insightful? 3. Write/edit a summary Is there a paper that you can help explain in plain English? 4. Upvote (or downvote) a paper Is there a paper already on the site that you have an opinion on? 5. Start a discussion. Is there a question you have about a paper? 6. Follow us on Twitter Hear our latest updates as we make progress.

Contact Us

hello@researchhub.com