Seeds of Science

Openness Movements
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The Seeds of Science team got in touch with IGDORE about publicising their new journal. I think it’s legit and looks refreshingly innovative (could the acronym SoS be intended to convey a more urgent appeal about the state of scientific publishing?). I thought it was an interesting coincidence that the name for the Seed of Science peer-reviewers is Gardeners - the Mindful Researchers initiative is active in this forum and also calls their community organizers gardeners :laughing:

From the homepage: https://www.theseedsofscience.org/

Scientific ideas, especially the truly innovative ones, are like seeds - they need fertile ground and tender care in order to grow to their true potential.

Seeds of Science ( ISSN: 2768-1254) is a journal and community dedicated to nurturing promising ideas (“Seeds of Science”) and helping them blossom into scientific innovation. There is one simple criterion in our peer review: do your ideas have the potential to advance science? Peer review is crowdsourced yes/no voting and commenting by our diverse network of reviewers (“gardeners” as we call them - free to join, more information available here). Visit the About page or read The Seeds of Science Manifesto to learn more about our mission and philosophy.

I enjoyed reading the Manifesto — SoS

More broadly, Seeds of Science is an experiment in publishing and community building that hopes to find some initial answers to the following questions:

  1. Can we create new organizations that encourage creativity and diversity of thought in the sciences?
  2. How many new ideas never see the light of day or receive the attention they deserve because of our current scientific publishing system?
  3. Can people outside of traditional academic science (or at the lower levels of it) make valuable contributions if given the proper platform and support?

Overall, Seeds of Science seems a bit similar to the Research Idea publication type at RIO and Medical Hypothesis (at least before it switch from editorial to peer review). I look forward to seeing how this develops.

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Thanks for the kind words Gavin! I can answer any questions here if anyone has them. I will also post a call for submissions in a few days.

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The SoS Research Collective Here is what we hope to offer independent researchers:

A title (SoS Research Fellow) and dedicated page featuring a biography, links to articles, etc.

Payment of $50 per peer-reviewed article (we will be dropping our $25 payment to all authors in lieu of this payment to members of the collective)

Editing services and advising (time and expertise permitting)

Promotion on the SoS website/substack (featuring your work on our Best of Science Blogging feed, researcher spotlight posts, etc.)

We know this isn’t much, but we have to start somewhere. We also aren’t asking for much (almost nothing really) from the SoS Research Fellows (see below). In the future, we hope to offer much more (research funding, stipends, and…), but for now we just hope to get the ball rolling and show the value of this model (any further ideas on what we could offer research fellows are welcome!).