RE: Get incentives for promoting STEM on Steem
After being away from Steemit for a few months, I logged back on to see what's been going on, and saw this post. You guys have been busy! This project sounds very exciting. I especially like the end goal, because publishers exert a stranglehold on the publication of scientific research, taking all of the monetary rewards for themselves (and leaving nothing for researchers and peer reviewers).
Beside the fact that the current system for publishing research rewards the middleman, it also tends to stifle the spread of scientific discoveries across the planet. The publishers severely restrict distribution, forcing college libraries to spend millions of dollars each year for access.
The goals of steemstem.io appear to challenge the "old way." If I'm reading these posts correctly, does the group intend to create an open-source style access to new research, making it free to all? And perhaps use the blockchain cryptocurrency as a way to distribute some economic rewards to the original authors and peer reviewers?
We are not aiming to replacing the publishing companies. We focus instead to strengthen science communication and popularization by giving incentives to researchers to write in layman terms about what they are doing and providing the information on Steem. This is a different story compared with what you suggest.
Changing the way research publishing works is actually on-going, with some fields being (much much much more in advanced than others. Publishers have also started to change their way of working. It is still not clear to me what could be the role of Steem here. There were discussions on that in the past (you can check the pevo project for instance) and the way SteemSTEM evolves may retrigger them in the future. However, oe step at a time :)
Very good. Thanks for the clarification, @lemouth. I might have to resume blogging again. I frequently run across research papers that are fairly interesting, and it's fun writing up summaries that put things into layman's terms and also show how each discovery fits into the "big picture."
Feel free to do that. We are encouraging many things at SteemSTEM, and especially what you propose.