About / Curator
Who owns this, and
who can overrule them.
Curator is asking scientists to put their judgment, their reputations and their unpublished thinking into someone else’s platform. That is a reasonable thing to hesitate over. This page sets out who holds the company, what stops it becoming the thing it replaces, and who decides when something goes wrong.
Before the details
This is a work in progress, and it is meant to be. This page will change as the community changes it.
The ethos
Two things at once
Curator was configured to hold two things that pull against each other: to incorporate the best of the scientific community, and to be a safe place for ideas to percolate and be candidly assessed. It is also a place where reputations are built and protected, through excellence in domain-specific scholarship.
The governance was given as much consideration as the platform, because two questions had to be answered before any of it was worth building.
How do you compete with an industry running on an estimated eighteen billion dollars a year — and if you succeed, what stops you becoming another behemoth that does not faithfully serve its community?
The answer had to be structural rather than good intentions. Something that could be trusted to represent the interests of science because of how it is built, not because of who currently runs it. Trust and transparency in governance are why this product can succeed, and the rest of this page is the arrangement that follows from that.
Corporate level
Who owns it
Discovery Curator is owned by Serapeum.science, a public-benefit company set up for the purpose. A public-benefit company allows its directors to make mission-oriented decisions rather than purely profit-motivated ones — the mission is a fiduciary duty, not a marketing page.
Serapeum is set up to be largely controlled by scientists. The details of that arrangement are Serapeum’s to state, on its own site, and this page will point there once they are published.
Roads not taken
Three structures we considered and rejected
Every alternative here is defensible, and each is the obvious suggestion from someone encountering the problem for the first time. The reasoning against them is worth stating plainly.
Why not a non-profit outright?
Building disruptive infrastructure needs access to capital, and a company has far more options for getting past the cold-start problem of building a community from nothing. It is also more straightforward to attract the best coders, editors and scientists as employees when they can hold a share of the success — inside a structure that scientists, not capital, largely control.
Why not sit inside a larger legacy non-profit?
Numerous philanthropies have expressed interest in improving publishing, and choosing one of them as a home means inheriting its particular alignment and competing with the others. SolvingFor is configured so they can all align within it instead — a bucket that any of them can donate or invest into, with their constituencies represented on its governing board. It is an integration, and a smoothing function, for aspirations that would otherwise pull apart.
Why not run it as a government does, like PubMed?
Science is international, and it matters that no single nation holds the records of science and scientists in the future. There is also a practical objection: governments can bestow approval on high-tech development, but they often prove cumbersome at initiating it, and slow to adapt afterwards. The same is true of some non-profits. Built outside any one government, all governments can align behind a neutral body.
Platform level
How decisions get made
Three bodies, on three very different clocks — two of them still being stood up. The fastest one is the only one already running, and it is the one you are part of.
- UsersDaily
The platform takes profound daily input from the people using it. The Send feedback button is the direct route; features and functionality can also be discussed at community@discovery-curator.com. This is not a suggestion box that empties into a void — it is the primary input.
- Scientific advisory boardIn formation
Being assembled now, and configured to hold roughly five hundred scientists as advisors, advocates and in some cases stakeholders. They will meet in person or asynchronously to debate and discuss the best uses of the platform, and they are who key decisions about direction will go to.
- Serapeum boardQuarterly
Monitors both the business and the mission. Larger projects may be shuttled up to the advisory board, the Serapeum board, or both.
Note the direction of travel. Input moves upward from daily use toward quarterly oversight; direction moves back down. The advisory board exists so that the quarterly body is never the first to hear about something that matters to scientists using the platform every day.
Platform level
When conflicts arise
Curator is being built with reputation-building features throughout, all of them meant to promote scholarship. We should be honest about the consequence: reputation has value, and anything with value attracts attempts to game it. Conflicts will arise. Assuming otherwise would be the naive design.
We will staff Curator with an editorial team to address these issues, and they will be reachable at community@discovery-curator.com to adjudicate conflicts. Where a case warrants it, we will convene a staff committee, the scientific advisory board, or both.
A platform that builds reputations has to be willing to defend them.