Office Hour with Richard Price

Below are four topics that I will be covering in relation to my talk:

- Instant distribution. Right now there is a 12 month time-lag between submitting a paper to a journal, and the paper being published. We need to remove that time-lag and introduce instant distribution of scientific ideas. - Better peer review. Right now the peer review process takes 12 months to complete, and only surfaces the opinions of two academics – academics who may be biased, uninformed about the subject area, or just in a bad mood when writing the review. 2 people is too small a sample size. We need a faster and more robust peer review system, one that surfaces the opinions of the entire scientific community, and in real-time. - Multi-media. Right now, scientists only share papers in PDF form. We need to bring about a science where scientists are incentivized to share data-sets, code, videos, blog posts, and comments on all these media. Right now a lot of the world’s scientific output does not get shared, because the system of credibility metrics only rewards one kind of format, the paper. We need to change this. - Open access. We need to bring about a world where a villager in India has the same access to the world’s scientific output as a professor in Harvard. When you open up access to the world’s scientific literature to the 2.5 billion people who are online right now, magical things may happen.