Great post! There is a clear parallel to how the @atproto.science ecosystem can disrupt the extractive science publishing industry & bring on millions of researchers with a new cooperative research stack. The system is ripe for disruption - see also @edhagen.net's post in the thread linked below >
Joe Basser
Who wants to make money in the Atmosphere? 🙋♂️
Aug 7, 2026 at 1:44 AM
The Drain of Scientific Publishing
The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
Introducing ATProto Science - Cosmik Labs
Announcing atproto.science! #ATproto has huge potential for supporting new ways of doing research, so we started @atproto.science to help bring together researchers, build community, and explore what's possible when science meets cutting-edge open social network protocols! 🧪 >
What's the point of Bibliograph? — Olamaelcu
Explaining why Bibliograph is being built and how it can benefit the ATProto ecosystem
Science Must Decentralize
Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat
The strain on scientific publishing
Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was approximately ~47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth - if any - in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing. To analyse this strain, we present five data-driven metrics showing publisher growth, processing times, and citation behaviours. We draw these data from web scrapes, requests for data from publishers, and material that is freely available through publisher websites. Our findings are based on millions of papers produced by leading academic publishers. We find specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year, contributing to this strain. Some publishers enabled this growth by adopting a strategy of hosting special issues, which publish articles with reduced turnaround times. Given pressures on researchers to publish or perish to be competitive for funding applications, this strain was likely amplified by these offers to publish more articles. We also observed widespread year-over-year inflation of journal impact factors coinciding with this strain, which risks confusing quality signals. Such exponential growth cannot be sustained. The metrics we define here should enable this evolving conversation to reach actionable solutions to address the strain on scientific publishing.
Stop Advertising The Atmosphere As Speculative Technology - thoughts (tiny)
The atproto enthusiast community is inadvertently turning others off to the ecosystem
The Discovery Engine: A Framework for AI-Driven Synthesis and Navigation of Scientific Knowledge Landscapes
Scientific progress relies on the effective accumulation, synthesis, and critical evaluation of knowledge. Traditionally, the well-documented, peer reviewed publication served as the primary standard for filtering and disseminating credible findings within the scientific community. Recently, however, we are witnessing an unprecedented acceleration in research output, a veritable explosion of scientific publications across all disciplines [1]. Yet, this very abundance creates a paradox: the sheer volume threatens to overwhelm the mechanisms designed for its assimilation and synthesis. Researchers, even within highly specialized subfields, face an almost insurmountable challenge in keeping abreast of relevant developments, integrating disparate findings, and identifying the truly novel signals amidst the noise [2]. This information overload contributes to disciplinary fragmentation, hindering the cross-pollination of ideas essential for disruptive innovation [3]. Furthermore, persistent concerns regarding "reproducibility crisis" [2], predatory journals, inflation of research areas[4], growing retractions and the potential influences of bibliometrics on research direction [5] highlight systemic challenges in validating and prioritizing scientific contributions to fundamental knowledge.
It’s time to get rid of the peer-reviewed paper
The peer-reviewed journal article, perhaps the single most important device behind the expansion of scientific knowledge in the last century, is an extraordinarily expensive way to share novelty: e…
Stop Advertising The Atmosphere As Speculative Technology · thoughts (tiny)
The atproto enthusiast community is inadvertently turning others off to the ecosystem
After reading about ATProto stuff this morning I realised that one possible future for science publishing, within something like @atproto.science, is that every scientist becomes their own journal. The key realisation is that a paper published to my own PDS can be published in many journals.
Great survey of the "scholarly interface design" frontier that also highlights the emerging role of the atproto.science and modular research ecosystems - @chive.pub @paperstarsorg.bsky.social @cosmik.network @semble.so @margin.at @discoursegraphs.bsky.social @curvenote.com and many more!
leotrs
1/ Scholarly publishing spent thirty years arguing about access. It has barely started arguing about what readers do with the paper once they have it. That second argument is turning into a field, forming around how science gets read and judged. Here is the map as I see it: aris.pub/blog/scholarly-interface-desi…
This is why @atproto.science is so relevant rn This compilation of essays indicates that scientists are most frustrated by insufficient “community tools and resources... Essential infrastructure for sharing, maintaining and building on existing work and data is also badly underdeveloped." >
What Scientists Said: Results from Astera's First Essay Competition
asterainstitute.substack.comWish there was a better academic publishing system? Bluesky and its underlying ATProto technology, along with services like @chive.pub and the broader @atproto.science ecosystem, could do the job. #AcademicSky 🧪 leaflet.pub/2f431faf-c125-4d34-ac52-e41a2…
Each academic paper should have its own Bluesky account
leaflet.pub
Chive
We're ramping up our alpha, and we'd love for you to join at chive.pub! Since we launched back in January, we've been adding a ton of fun features; and to introduce them, we're going to be doing a series of deep dives over the next couple weeks on chive.leaflet.pub.
We're thinking about publishing a compendium of #ATScience projects submitted to the workshop (incl abstracts, preprints and published works) - @aaronstevenwhite.io could @chive.pub potentially support that use case?
