Science Communication as a Collective Intelligence Endeavor: A Manifesto and Examples for Implementation

Effective science communication is challenging when scientific messages are informed by a continually updating evidence base and must often compete against misinformation. We argue that we need a new program of science communication as collective intelligence—a collaborative approach, supported by technology. This would have four key advantages over the typical model where scientists communicate as individuals: scientific messages would be informed by (a) a wider base of aggregated knowledge, (b) contributions from a diverse scientific community, (c) participatory input from stakeholders, and (d) better responsiveness to ongoing changes in the state of knowledge.

NLnet; Nanoarguments

Scientific knowledge is currently scattered across papers, repositories, and disconnected platforms, with no structured way to trace how claims connect to evidence or how arguments develop. Nanoarguments builds a framework and tools for creating, browsing, and contributing to a global, federated graph of scientific discourse and evidence. Researchers and their communities can collaboratively structure claims, evidence chains, and discussion as nanopublications, which are small, cryptographically signed Linked Data snippets with precise provenance and authorship, published to a decentralized peer-to-peer network. The project builds upon the Nanodash interface to help users browse, edit, and aggregate discourse and evidence graphs, and integrates with dokieli to enable in-context authoring of nanopublications as inline annotations while reading or writing a document. A bidirectional ActivityPub connector bridges the nanopublication network and the fediverse, allowing discourse threads to start as social exchanges and crystallize into persistent, machine-readable evidence records. The project will be piloted with early adopter research groups in discourse and evidence modeling. All components will be released as open-source modules that other systems can build upon.

The Computational Democracy Project

Tools for deliberative democracy.

Open Evaluation: A Vision for Entirely Transparent Post-Publication Peer Review and Rating for Science

The two major functions of a scientific publishing system are to provide access to and evaluation of scientific papers. While open access (OA) is becoming a reality, open evaluation (OE), the other side of coin, has received less attention. Evaluation steers the attention of the scientific community and thus the very course of science. It also influences the use of scientific findings in public policy. The current system of scientific publishing provides only journal prestige as an indication of the quality of new papers and relies on a non-transparent and noisy pre-publication peer review process, which delays publication by many months on average. Here I propose an OE system, in which papers are evaluated post-publication in an ongoing fashion by means of open peer review and rating. Through signed ratings and reviews, scientists steer the attention of their field and build their reputation. Reviewers are motivated to be objective, because low-quality or self-serving signed evaluations will negatively impact their reputation. A core feature of this proposal is a division of powers between the accumulation of evaluative evidence and the analysis of this evidence by paper evaluation functions (PEFs). PEFs can be freely defined by individuals or groups (e.g. scientific societies) and provide a plurality of perspectives on the scientific literature. Simple PEFs will use averages of ratings, weighting reviewers (e.g. by H-factor) and rating scales (e.g. by relevance to a decision process) in different ways. Complex PEFs will use advanced statistical techniques to infer the quality of a paper. Papers with initially promising ratings will be more deeply evaluated. The continual refinement of PEFs in response to attempts by individuals to influence evaluations in their own favor will make the system ungameable. OA and OE together have the power to revolutionize scientific publishing and usher in a new culture of transparency, constructive criticism, and collaboration.

filaebot/chorus

ATProto-native community notes with bridging-based consensus