[OKFN-FR] Giving researchers power over the entire knowledge life-cycle is good for them and for knowledge

[Gabriele - Qeios]

Dear list members,
I’m Gabriele Marinello, co-founder along with Giorgio Bedogni and Alberto Bedogni of Qeios (https://www.qeios.com/about). The reason I’m writing - to share with you what Qeios is about. Hopefully, you’ll find this interesting. It goes without saying, it’s about Open Knowledge.
We are striving hard to finally give researchers power over the entire knowledge life-cycle: production, quality check and sharing. The overall result is not just immensely positive for all the stakeholders in the process, but also, and most of all, for the output - knowledge. Free, better and more comparable/reproducible knowledge.
In short.
We do are applying the power of the community review, as many now do (fortunately), but to be faaaar more effective, we are doing this at 2 different levels: the ingredients and the cake! The ingredients being the definitions of which an article, the cake, is made of. We firstly want the community to finally reach a consensus on what the best definitions to be used are when creating knowledge (a real “Definictionary” for researchers, so that they can all speak the same language!), and then let the same community openly review the output in terms of articles.
Just to make you a quick example of an “ingredient”: think about the definition of “Quality of Life” (QoL), essential metric when evaluating almost any medical treatment (what is medicine fighting for?); there are thousands of different definitions of QoL… and anyone is using the one which is best suited to his/her p-value… in short, anyone is speaking the language which can benefit most to him/her.
And a research article is made of hundreds of definitions… and for each there are dozens of variants... we can now easily understand how incomparable can be 2 articles that are trying to find an answer to the same question (e.g. what is the best treatment for Depression?), each being made of its unique mix of definitions... and it is precisely here that the indecision and inconclusiveness of the research arise: we are not able, in almost all cases, to say "treatment A is better than treatment B" simply because the 2 papers, the 2 studies, are not comparable!
Articles and definitions are composed and published directly on the platform (and Qeios editor is satisfying like never before ; )). This is the most suitable way to take advantage of the new object “definition” in producing the best possible knowledge: the rating system built on definitions allows in fact researchers the assisted-choice of the best ingredients to use when composing their articles... and if now anyone can easily recognise the best definitions, articles will be automatically composed more homogeneously, which means more comparable/reproducible research.
Researchers have the power, let’s use that power!
For those who are not familiar with the open post-publication peer review (i.e. community review), I wouldn’t be able to give a better insight into its value than Andrew Gelman here: https://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/01/peer-review-make-no-damn-sense/. To better understand what the guiding principles of the Qeios philosophy are, I would also suggest these articles by Jon Tennant et al. and Jason Priem: https://f1000research.com/articles/6-1151/v3 ; https://www.nature.com/articles/495437a.
In the words of Einstein: "Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.” We defend the creativeness of the individual in the same way as we support the value that only the community can add.
If you are curious, you can find a video and more information here: https://www.qeios.com/about
If then you are interested, you can sign up using an invitation link, here is Giorgio’s: https://www.qeios.com/invitation-to-join/researcher/314
If you have any questions/doubts or feedback, feel free to drop me an email at gm at qeios.com or call me at +39 380 8912791.
Wishing you all a wonderful weekend (in advance),
Gabriele
—
Gabriele Marinello
Co-founder, Qeios Ltd
34, Old Barrack Yard, SW1X 7NP, London, UKUK   +44 (0) 7426 853828IT   +39 380 8912791gm at qeios.comwww.qeios.com
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