❔Problems

In general, the existing process for disseminating scientific advancements and human knowledge is disastrous. It suffers from a multitude of shortcomings that indeed oppose the real purpose of Education and Science. We categorize these shortcomings into three main classes:

Centralized Monopoly and Disempowerment of Contributors

Science and Education operate in trillion-dollar markets. You'd expect these markets to be extremely oriented towards development and innovation, but that's not how things work.

The Education Market is estimated to be around 10T dollars. Looking at the Scientific Publish Market, Elsevier dominates with a higher net profit than companies like Google and Apple. The problem with these numbers is that they come purely from monopolization and free labor, with some reports referring to it as a “bizarre triple-pay” system.

It arises from the fact that governments typically fund the research conducted at research institutions where researchers independently produce work and finally give it to publishers at no cost. Unlike other industries, the actual personnel conducting the review and scientific validity process are, in fact, researchers themselves in what is known as the peer-review process which are non-paid jobs. This process leads to the disempowerment of new contributors, which is something that you don't want to see in an area dependent on innovation.

Non-democratic Access and High Barriers to Scientific Infrastructure and Outcomes

Besides the fact that the middleman entities own the copyright of the scientific articles, in some models they charge extremely high costs to publish and grant access to them. Besides all the effort, the researchers don't even own the copyright and can still pay to publish, to have access, or both. This cost exceeds $10K per period, which can easily sum up to millions of dollars for a full subscription. A single access to one article can cost tens of dollars.

The primary issue with this model is that it makes scientific records accessible only to the affluent, effectively excluding the rest of the world from consuming advancements in science and technology. As a result, a scientist from a developing country without access to articles in her field cannot contribute meaningfully to that field. This gatekeeping problem extends beyond poorer countries. There is a statistic that shows that the price of books has increased by 1041% since 1977. As recently highlighted by renowned investor Paul Graham in a tweet, the system is so broken that “pirate” websites have to be suggested to young students to read some papers.

A 2019 report by the Research4Life program revealed that over half of surveyed researchers in low- and middle-income countries experienced difficulties accessing necessary information for their research, with 53% citing a lack of access to journals and databases. A 2018 study by the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) found that many universities in these countries face significant challenges accessing and using digital technologies for teaching and research.

Web0-based Old-fashioned and Non-representative scientific record

We argue that scientific publishing and education processes remain entrenched in the “Web0” or pre-web age. Even after transitioning to the web, the gatekeeper middleman maintains and controls the publication of these paper records in a centralized manner.

Nowadays, the publishing process still primarily emphasizes the paper (article) as the main, often the only, record of scientific outcomes. This paper-based record is inherited from the 150-year-old format where human knowledge was accessible solely through printed papers, periodicals, or books.

Because of this excessive focus on paper, other artifacts such as visuals, videos, datasets, codebases, and system setups are frequently considered secondary or ignored altogether. This model makes the case of knowledge fragmentation very prone to happening since information is spread across different platforms such as YouTube, SlideShare, GitHub, Google, Kaggle, pen drives, etc...