[Linux-aus] Grant application to Linux Australia for Aletheia

Mon Jun 19 16:53:21 AEST 2017

Hi Rowland,

Thanks for the below. We've consulted pretty widely with researchers here in Aus and overseas (two of the people on our team currently publish academic papers in their fields and we're working with a group Jon Tennant is involved with that are publishing a thesis around a better peer review process, our peer review process is going to be build around their findings). If it strengthens the application I can list out the different researchers and groups we've spoken with.

I'd contend we do need a technical fix to paywalls along with a community fix and we're looking to address both. F1000Research, PLOS ONE and others are great, even Sci-Hub if you feel adventurous, but I think we have some positives over existing solutions.
- Websites are a single point of failure, they can fall over through neglect or malicious actors. Aletheia is a decentralised and distributed database, no single point of failure.
- Open access journals and preprint archives can be bought out by larger paywall journals. Aletheia is under a GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, Elsevier is not buying us.
- Open access journals charge for submissions, it's free to submit to Aletheia. We're looking at how the platform can be monetised but it won't be through submission of or access to content.
- You can't see what open access journals spend their money on, we publish our financial records.
- Open Access journals often die because they don't make profit, we're community run so as long as we have enough community nodes the contents of Aletheia is stored forever.
- Open Access journals don't have publishing impact factor. We won't either, but we're building a reputation system based on submitted articles, peer review articles (our platform handles peer review), community participation and some other factors. This transparent reputation score is your contribution academia so we're looking to turn that into publishing impact factor once we are well established.
- The community doesn't have a say in how open access journals are run usually, they are a bit of a block box. The community runs Aletheia as a decentralised autonomous organisation.
- Open access aren't not open source, you can audit all our code, look at how we are storing papers and data sets, etc.
- There has been little innovation in academic publishing since journals were established in the 16th centry. The only real change is the journals now have websites and databases. I think looking at doing something different in this space is worth the effort just for the exploration alone, and I'd rather open source communities do that exploring over corporations because if a better way is hit on it should be open from the start.
- A decentralised and distributed database administered as a DAO has applications past scientific publishing, we want to prove it works in this space and then move into other areas.

I'm not sure if this covers all your concerns, we have a white paper covering Aletheia's features if you're interested, https://github.com/aletheia-foundation/aletheia-whitepaper/blob/master/WHITE-PAPER.md

Regards,

Kade Morton

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Linux-aus] Grant application to Linux Australia for Aletheia
Local Time: June 19, 2017 3:36 PM
UTC Time: June 19, 2017 5:36 AM
From: rowland.mosbergen at gmail.com
To: Kade Morton <kademorton at protonmail.com>
linux-aus at lists.linux.org.au <linux-aus at lists.linux.org.au>, council at linux.org.au <council at linux.org.au>

Hi Kade,

As a person who works with researchers everyday at the University of Melbourne, the idea of paywalls is a very hot topic at the moment.

Open access publications such as F1000Research and PLOS ONE have provided researchers with more choices than ever before.

Yet the big publications can still provide paywalls due to the way that research funding is granted, based on publication impact factor. Being able to publish in Nature gives one an advantage the next time the NHMRC and ARC grants come around.

In my opinion, the issue around paywalls in research is very much one that needs a community fix, not a technical fix. And that fix is going to be a long and complicated journey.

I am unsure how much of this backstory you know or which researchers you have talked to from a range of disciplines like Life Sciences, Humanities, Astronomy etc. I would highly recommend engaging with these researchers if you don't have those relationships already.

In my opinion, this kind of project would be discussed at a University and Funding level (eg NHMRC) both nationally and internationally. I think the technical considerations would be of a very low priority

Regards,

Rowland Mosbergen

On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 2:52 PM, Kade Morton via linux-aus <linux-aus at lists.linux.org.au> wrote:
I've been asked to resend

***

Hi all,

I wanted to make a grant for the open source project I co-founded, Aletheia.

Project name: Aletheia
Aim of the project: To provide an alternative to publishing scientific research behind paywalls and to popularise decentralised autonomous organisations.

Aletheia is a decentralised and distributed database which we're applying to academic publishing. Basically a a database that is free to upload to and access from, administered by the community as a decentralised autonomous organisation. Aletheia would be an alternative to publishing research behind paywalls.

Have a look at our source code here: https://github.com/aletheia-foundation/aletheia-app
Have a look at our community documentation here: https://github.com/aletheia-foundation/aletheia-admin

Key stages or milestones of the project:

Completed
- Onboarding documents up to standard that newcomers can come onto the project, documents hosted on GitHub.
- Participated in the Mozilla Global Sprint https://mozilla.github.io/global-sprint/
- Get application running on Ubuntu
- Get application running on Mac
- Cofounder to complete courses through Mozilla to help create avenues for Mozilla's continued support for Aletheia

To be Completed
- Get application running on Windows
- Finish MVP (aiming for 27th of October 2017)
- Run presentation about Aletheia and the applications of decentralised and open source technology in science at MozFest (application made, waiting to hear for acceptance, presentation will be in London, 27th of October 2017)
- Finish Aletheia 2.0 (aiming for 1st of July 2018)

How the success of the project will be measured: Number of downloads, number of active community users and number of documents stored in Aletheia
Estimated cost breakdown of the project, including any materials, projects or online services that are required to deliver the project. The cost breakdown should include estimates of labour costs and/or professional services:
- $15,000 for Extra Credits to create a video covering Aletheia.
- $10,000 legal fees, up front consultation and ongoing
- $2,000 incidentals incurred so far (server costs, custom domain name, travel expenses we have coming up)
- $5,000 to have website professionally built.

These are a great deal of costs. I'd be happy to just apply to have the video covered. We think a professionally created video that's engaging and made by a talented group of people with a large fan base that's easily sharable on social media and can be given to anyone who asks "what is Aletheia?" would be the greatest boon to our project. We need to get the word out about our project and increase the rate of volunteers coming on to the project, we think the visual medium of a video is the best way to do this. Unfortunately we don't have any video editors working on the project yet, and we've attempted to negotiate an "open source rate" with Extra Credits but they have said $15,000 is the lowest they will go. This single cost can be paid and therefore count as incurred before 30th of September 2017.

The project team, their credentials and professional capabilities, especially their history of open source, open data, open hardware or open culture contributions:
- Kade Morton, Mozilla regional coordinator for Brisbane, Mozilla techspeaker, completed the Mozilla open leadership course for open source projects, organised Aletheia's contributions to Mozilla's Global Sprint 2017, board member of Electronic Frontiers Australia
- Roo (wishes to remain anonymous) cofounded Aletheia with Kade, works for ThoughtWorks on a number of open source projects, is extremely active in running privacy, online security and decentralisation meetups locally. If our application hinges on the identity of Aletheia's cofounder I can approach him and ask if he would mind his name being disclosed to the council but as a blanket rule he has asked for anonymity.

Person responsible for project: Kade Morton
A statement including a willingness to provide regular project updates on the project: I would be more than happy to provide Linux Australia with regular status updates on Aletheia and how our client is coming along.

Regards,

Kade Morton
Twitter: @cypath
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kade-morton-34179283
Keybase: https://keybase.io/kademorton

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