Activities
January 2024 Update
Seeds of Science would like to announce the founding of the SoS Research Collective. Supporting independent researchers (and academics thinking independently) has always been one of our primary objectives, and we hope that this initiative will now allow us to fulfill that mission in more tangible ways. You can read the full announcement post on our Substack to learn more about the motivation, philosophy, and structure of the Collective, but in brief we would like to offer researchers the following:
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.)
Anyone conducting independent research (including undergraduate or graduate students conducting research activities outside of their academic work) who feels that they might benefit from being a SoS research fellow is welcome to apply (see announcement post for details).
We are also beginning to explore new ways of funding SoS in order to pay for the author fees and other operating costs. This section below from the announcement post describes our current situation and how you can support us financially or non-financially:
Seeds of Science was lucky enough to receive a small but generous grant from Scott Alexander’s ACX grants about two years ago. Prior to this funding, we were self-funded by the founding team, and while we were/are technically a business enterprise, there were no plans for bringing in revenue (we joked that we weren’t a non-profit but a "no-profit). Now with this new venture and the author fees that we hope to pay our research fellows, we anticipate the grant money will run out some time this year and we will have to go back to the no-profit model.
So that’s why we are now offering paid subscriptions to this Substack. Here’s the rub though—putting ideas (i.e. seeds of science) behind a paywall is sort of against our whole philosophy. So we aren’t going to do that. So what is a paid subscription getting you then? The sheer bliss that comes with knowing you are one of the good guys, that you stand on the right side of history, that your descendents will smile upon your deeds. What I’m really trying to say is that a subscription is really just a donation.
As far as non-financial ways of supporting us (we know all you students and early-career researchers reading this are just ROLLING in the dough), the first thing you can do is spread the word by sharing this post (and the journal) with your friends, family, colleagues, lovers, haters, etc. The second thing you can do is repeatedly shout SEEDS OF SCIENCE at the top of your lungs from the nearest mountaintop. Beyond that, we'd love to hear from anyone who is interested in what we're doing and would like to get involved or help in some way (we can imagine a few roles that might be of interest to some).
In addition to what is mentioned in the passage, we are also actively seeking funders/sponsors (for SoS as a whole or just the collective) and advertisers (for the Substack newsletter) - any leads would be greatly appreciated! We are also looking to connect with any researchers/organizations in the global south who might be interested in learning more about how SoS could support their scientific community.
Sincerely,
SoS team (Roger, Dario, and Sergey)
April 2023 Update
1. Nurturing Non-Traditional Science — a podcast interview about SoS with co-founder Roger's Bacon.
2. SoS co-founders Dr. Dario Krpan and Roger’s Bacon participated in a panel discussion at the London School of Economics, “Different Perspectives on Diversity of Thought in Social Science” (video). Dr. Krpan and Bacon spoke about how we can encourage greater diversity of thought by reconsidering norms around scientific writing/publishing and by finding more ways to get amateurs/independent researchers involved in social science research. A short commentary on the event which mentions Seeds of Science was written in the Lancet.
"The point of this journal, founded by Roger's Bacon (a pseudonym) and Dario Krpan, is to provide a place where people outside the system of science can publish their findings, ideas, and views. Roger's Bacon identified two neglected aspects of diversity. First, psychological diversity. We live in environments that shape our minds. The academic environment privileges particular characteristics: diligence, competitiveness, verbal abilities, organisational skills, quantitative expertise, self-promotion. What about those who do not possess these qualities? Are they to be excluded from science? Second, functional diversity. We think of ourselves as free agents, but the settings we work in impose incentives and constraints that limit our freedom. To promote psychological and functional diversity, we must create possibilities for non-traditional scientists, amateurs, to contribute."
3. "Amateurs" making big discoveries in science/math:
A Total Amateur May Have Just Rewritten Human History With Bombshell Discovery
"In what may be a major archaeological breakthrough, an independent researcher has suggested that the earliest writing in human history has been hiding in plain sight in prehistoric cave paintings in Europe, a discovery that would push the timeline of written language back by tens of thousands of years, reports a new study."
Hobbyist Finds Math’s Elusive ‘Einstein’ Tile
"The surprisingly simple tile is the first single, connected tile that can fill the entire plane in a pattern that never repeats — and can’t be made to fill it in a repeating way."
4. Recently published papers:
How to Escape From the Simulation
Is a Qualitative Metric of Falsifiability Possible?
The Muscle-Readers, a Historical Sketch
Why Proposal Review Should Be More Like Meteorology
Will general antiviral protocols always be science fiction?
Big thanks to all the gardeners who participated in these reviews!
5. Recent posts from from our Best of Science Blogging feed:
PNAS is Not a Good Journal (and Other Hard Truths about Journal Prestige)
On Not Reading Papers
In Defense of Basic Science - some great quotes in this one:
"I’m reminded of the apocryphal story about Michael Faraday who, when challenged by an audience member to justify the value of some discovery, retorted: “Madam, what is the use of a newborn child?”
“People cannot foresee the future well enough to predict what’s going to develop from basic research,” says George Smoot, a 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physics. “If we only did applied research, we would still be making better spears.”
6. A fascinating plant-based "seed of science" that was published a few weeks ago (sadly, not by us): Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative.
7. We have some exciting new submissions in the queue, a few of which come from the gardener community. It's great to see gardeners submit articles and we hope to see more of this in the future. I know many of you are academics (and non-academics) with very busy schedules during the spring, but summer is also a great time for planting seeds (of science) - write up that speculative idea that's been bouncing around your head and submit it to SoS!
8. Dr. Payal B. Joshi is our latest gardener to qualify for a dedicated biography page and peer review comment document (learn more about this initiative here).
9. The gardener community is now 267 strong! Tell your mom, tell your family, tell your friends (gardener page, registration form).
October 2022 Update
In addition to being a scientific journal, we have always viewed Seeds of Science as an experiment in publishing, with the review process and overall structure of the journal serving as our hypotheses. With a year's worth of data in hand, the managing team has concluded that a few changes should be made, changes which will hopefully allow SoS to grow in a sustainable manner and better achieve our goal (something that will never change) of providing an inclusive open-access platform for speculative and exploratory thinking in science.
1) Gardeners can now participate in the editorial process and be paid for doing so. Authors will now be paid as well.
Currently, roughly half of our submissions come through invitation - Roger's Bacon (head editor of the journal who handles all the day-to-day operations) sees an article on the internet, reaches out to the author, asks if they would be interested in submitting to SoS, and then typically suggests some revisions that would make it work better as a stand-alone scientific article. Limiting the editorial process to one person represents a significant bottleneck for our goal of publishing more papers and also biases the journal towards topics that Roger's Bacon knows/cares about.
We would now like to pay gardeners $25 USD to propose articles and serve as the editor for those articles if they are accepted for publication. In addition to the editorial fee, gardeners will receive an editing credit (noted in the article and on our website) and a dedicated gardener page featuring a biography and a list of edited papers. Authors will also be paid $25 per article.
We recognize that this will not be a significant sum to some, but given our current funding situation (the $6,000 grant that we were awarded through the ACX grants program in January) this is all that we can offer at this time; we are also happy to donate the payment to a charity of the editor/author's choosing if that will be more meaningful to them. Further details of the proposal/editorial process can be found here, but in brief gardeners will be responsible for ensuring that the article features high-quality writing appropriate to our format and for finalizing the article after it passes review - i.e. working with the author during the revision process, deciding which gardener comments to publish and in what order, and putting the article in SoS format (template provided). In some cases, the editorial process may represent a substantial effort on the part of the gardener, but in others it may not - e.g. for papers which are a great fit for our format and pass the review with flying colors.
Please reach out if you have an author/article that we might be interested in publishing even if you do not wish to serve as an editor - we will consider payment for article "scouting" as well. Conversely, please reach out if you are interested in serving as an editor but have no article to propose, we will consider you when we have a submission which might be a good fit for your expertise.
2) In addition to the PDF format, we will begin publishing our papers on Substack.
Currently, we only publish our paper as PDFs; this is unusual in that most journals publish PDFs and a version that can be read directly on the website. This limits the accessibility and readability of our papers, something that we hope to address by adding this new format. For those who are not familiar with Substack, it is an online writing website that also sends out articles through an automatically set-up email newsletter. We will be using Substack instead of posting the text on our website because the formatting process will be simpler and because we think that giving readers the option to receive our articles through email will improve their accessibility/shareability and grow our readership (thus making us a more attractive platform to authors and improving the quality of our articles in the long run). Substack will also make it easier for us to eventually set up a donation system by charging for a subscription to the SoS newsletter - this is not to say that any of our articles will be behind a paywall (we will always be 100% open access), only that people who wish to support us could make payments by offering to pay for their subscription to the email newsletter.
Our substack page can be found at TheSeedsofScience.pub. Right now, we have only published our most recent paper "What are the Red Flags for Neural Network Suffering?", but we will go through our catalogue and publish all our papers in this new format over the next few months.
Two more important notes: (1) all papers will still receive DOI and the PDFs will still be searchable in major academic databases, (2) the SoS Substack mailing list is separate from the gardener mailing list used for the review process (gardeners may choose to sign up for the substack mailing list, but it is not required).
Any help with promotion of our new substack would be greatly appreciated!
3) We will now sometimes send out multiple articles for review at the same time.
One major issue with our current review system is speed - we currently give each article a 2-3 week review period, limiting us to about two papers per month and thus ~24 in a year. We feel that this is too low of a number as most scientific journals will publish our yearly amount in about 2-3 months. We also pride ourselves on a quick turnaround for authors, but as we have started to receive more submissions the wait time has extended longer than two months at times, which we feel is too long and unfair to authors.
Going forward, we will sometimes release two papers at the same time for a two-week review period. Voting/commenting is completely voluntary as it is now, and gardeners may comment on just one of the papers, both, or none. The publication criteria and the mechanics of the review will not change - the only difference is that the review form will have separate voting/commenting questions for each article that is being reviewed.
August 2022 Update
1. "The Cult Deficit: Analysis and Speculation", "What does it mean to represent? Mental representations as falsifiable memory patterns", and "Moral Weights of Animals, Considering Viewpoint Uncertainty" are now published - big thanks to all the gardeners who participated in these reviews. The authors of the mental representations article included a very nice note in their acknowledgements: "Finally, we thank the editors of the journal for creating this unique space that makes doing science fun again." (...make scientific publishing great again?)
2. Seeds of Science is discussed in a recent NewScience essay written by co-founder Roger’s Bacon, “Research Papers Used to Have Style. What happened?”. The essay traces the evolution of scientific writing style over time and makes the case that we would benefit from more aesthetic value in our writing; Seeds of Science is mentioned as an example of a journal that gives authors the freedom to write in non-traditional styles and formats.
"The way that we write is inseparable from the way that we think, and restrictions in one necessarily lead to restrictions in the other."
3. Seeds of Science is continually looking for new ways to reward gardeners who contribute valuable intellectual work by participating in our peer review process. To this end, we are launching a new initiative - for gardeners who have so far contributed 5 substantial comments (dating back to our launch in August 2021), we will provide the following:
1) A dedicated page that includes a short biography (including any links that you choose) and a donation link of your choosing, either to a personal account (paypal, cash app, venmo, crypto wallet, etc.) or to a charity (with instructions to make a donation in your name if you choose).
2) A document (formatted like any other SoS article) which lists your comments along with links to the articles in which they appear. This article will be assigned a DOI and will appear in academic databases like all of our other articles. We will create one review document every year for qualifying gardeners. This first one will cover 2021-2022 but after that we will provide a separate document for 2023, 2024, etc., all listed on your biography page. In order to get this initiative off the ground, we are launching our first batch of biography pages/comment documents right now, but going forward we will do this at the end of every calendar year. Currently, only two gardeners - Ted Wade (bio, review document) and Dan James (bio, review document) - have qualified; for the numerous gardeners who have made 3 or 4 comments thus far and will likely reach 5 for 2021-2022, we will create your biography page/review document at the end of the year. For gardeners who have just joined us, we will roll over any comments in the last few months of 2022 towards your count (5 to qualify) for 2023. All of this information and the list of qualifying gardeners can now be found on the Gardener Biographies page.
4. We have hired Mia Aiyana as a communications and outreach assistant. Mia lives in Dubai and is interested in synthetic biology and the intersection between science and art (and writes about these subjects and more on her Substack).
5. The gardener community is now 199 strong! Recommend Seeds of Science to a friend (gardener registration form) and help us break into the 200s!!!
Best, SoS team (Roger, Dario, and Sergey)
April 2022 Update
1. "On Scaling Academia", "Building a Brain: An Introduction to Narrative Complexity, a language & internal dialogue-based theory of human consciousness", and "Market Failures in Science" have been published. Big thanks to all who voted and commented!
2. We have some exciting new submissions in the queue for review (heh), some of which come from the gardener community. It's great to see gardeners submit articles and we hope to see more of this in the future. I know many of you are academics (and non-academics) with very busy schedules during the spring, but summer is also a great time for planting seeds (of science) - writing up that speculative idea that's been bouncing around in your brain for a while could make for a nice (somewhat) relaxing summer project.
3. Gardener Rachel Prudden discusses Seeds of Science in her post ("The new academy") on the emerging space of next-gen publishing.
"Seeds of Science has a great disruptive strategy, focusing on an entirely different part of the value chain to conventional academic publishing and putting emphasis on building community. It remains to be seen how well their open review system works for assessing contributions from specialist domains - that said, it’s the only one of these tools currently with a formal review system."
4. We know that many of you are publishing scientific papers and blog posts on a variety of cool topics and we would love to help get the word out however we can (for example, gardener Ted Wade recently shared his substack Sentient Artifact with us). If you have anything you'd like to share with the community, please reach out to us - we'd love to promote your work on twitter and also put together a "community update" every few months that shares blog posts, research articles, job openings/opportunities, etc. from the gardeners. Anything that speaks to the mission of SoS (broadly, innovation in scientific publishing) would be of great interest but anything science related is great as well.
5. From the Guardian: "The big idea: should we get rid of the scientific paper?"
6. Reflections on the review process and direction of the journal:
Judging by the comments and votes of recent articles, there seems to be a considerable difference of opinion between gardeners on what kinds of articles should be accepted. While we do have very limited requirements on style/format and content (e.g. much more open to speculation than a typical journal), there are many gardeners that reject articles because it seems too much like a blog post (e.g. too informally written) and not a "proper" scientific article. We also have some gardeners that reject articles because they do not possess enough novel ideas, while others accept them because they still provide scientific value in some way, perhaps in framing known issues in a novel manner. These tensions are inevitable given the openness of our format. While we had certain ideas in mind when we (Dr. Dario Krpan, Dr. Sergey Samsonau, and Roger's Bacon) founded the journal, we also recognized that gardeners would interpret the publication criteria in different ways and that the diversity of opinions would ultimately make for a stronger review process. That being said, we believe there are a few things that gardeners can keep in mind which might improve the review process.
1. Try to focus on the quality of ideas and not style/format. If you feel like there are good ideas in the article that deserve to be published but the quality of the writing could be improved then it's probably best if you vote "yes" and note your criticisms in the comments. If enough people critique the writing then we will require stylistic revisions before publication. While the quality of writing can certainly detract from the content of the article at a certain point, it would be a shame if an article had great ideas but was rejected for more superficial reasons which can be addressed in revisions.
2. Please keep in mind that comments from gardeners will be published along with the manuscript. If you agree with most of the article and think some of the ideas are novel/useful but have an issue with one section/idea then it might be best to vote yes but voice your complaint in the comments. This is a grey area of course - maybe the one issue is really important and invalidates the whole article - but also keep in mind that we can still require a revision to address the issue even if the vote is overwhelmingly positive. It should also be mentioned that our criteria explicitly states that we are open to speculation; while not all speculation is created equal, it is probably not appropriate to reject an article simply because it is speculative.
3. While it would be great if all of our articles possessed truly novel ideas and speculations, that is a very high bar, one that is not passed by many articles published in more traditional journals. As we grow and recruit more authors, we may be able to focus on new ideas/speculations, but for now it may be more profitable to emphasize the "scientific value" aspect of our criteria. We have added a clarification to our criteria that addresses the novelty issue:
"The requirement of "novel ideas" may also be satisfied in a very broad sense, perhaps through providing a novel framing of a known issue or by applying a pre-existing idea in a new context. We encourage readers to ask themselves - can I imagine a future (however distant) where this Seed has contributed to scientific progress? Can you imagine someone citing this article or crediting it as inspiration?"
Reviews
“Decentralized Autonomous Education”
Deadline for review: 4/27"Arctic Instincts? The universal principles of Arctic psychological adaptation and the origins of East Asian psychology"
Status: Accepted (votes: 9/0 yes/no)“The Evolution of the Blank Slate”
Status: Rejected (votes: 3/5 yes/no)“Attitudes Toward Artificial General Intelligence: Results from American Adults 2021 and 2023”
Status: Accepted (votes: 12/1 yes/no)“Unfolding Hyper-Sovereignty: A Preliminary Examination of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) through Definitional Properties”
Status: Rejected (votes: 3/6 yes/no)“The Economics of Time Travel”
Status: Accepted (votes: 8/5 yes/no)“Psychological Corollaries of Scientific Theories: The Ecological Crisis as a Case Study in the Need for Synthesis”
Status: Accepted (votes: 8/3 yes/no)"Cilia Disorders in the Genomics Era: Historical Overview and Commentary on Ciliopathy Diagnostics"
Status: Accepted (votes: 9/2 yes/no)“Visualizing researchers’ scientific contributions with radar plots”
Status: Accepted (votes: 22/4 yes/no)“The Universe of Minds”
Status: Accepted (votes: 9/6 yes/no)“Forager Facts”
Status: Accepted (votes: 10/3, yes/no)“We See the Sacred From Afar, To See It The Same”
Status: Accepted (votes: 9/4, yes/no)"Concepts and Categories: A Synthesis of Principles"
Status: Accepted (votes: 9/3, yes/no)“The Need for Long-term Research”
Status: Accepted with revisions
(votes: 13/14, yes/no)“Perspective: Focused-Ultrasound Guided Neuropeptide Delivery as a Novel Therapeutic Approach in Psychiatry”
Status: Accepted (votes: 9/0, yes/no)“The Cosmic Pinball Machine”
Status: Rejected (votes: 9/5, yes/no)“How to Escape the Simulation”
Status: Accepted (votes: 18/1, yes/no)"Is a qualitative metric of falsifiability possible?"
Status: Accepted (votes: 14/1, yes/no)“Why Peer Review Should Be More Like Meteorology”
Status: Accepted (votes: 18/1, yes/no)"Will general antiviral protocols always be science fiction?"
Status: Accepted (votes: 10/0, yes/no)“Are experiments possible?”
Status: Rejected (votes: 10/7, yes/no)"The Rise and Fall of the Dot-Probe Task: Opportunities for Metascientific Learning"
Status: Accepted (votes: 9/4, yes/no)"Decentralized scientific research proposal evaluation"
Status: Accepted (votes: 11/2, yes/no)“Potential Problems of Paying Reviewers”
Status: Accepted (votes: 22/8, yes/no)“The Muscle-Readers, a Historical Sketch”
Status: Accepted (votes: 14/6, yes/no)“What are the Red Flags for Neural Network Suffering?”
Status: Accepted (votes: 16/6, yes/no)“Notes on the Inexact Sciences”
Status: Accepted (votes: 13/7, yes/no)“Reflections of an Independent Researcher”
Status: Rejected (votes 15/20, yes/no)“Moral Weights of Six Animals, Considering Viewpoint Uncertainty”
Status: Accepted (votes: 17/5, yes/no)“What does it mean to represent? Mental representations as falsifiable memory patterns”
Status: Accepted (votes: 20/0, yes/no)“Cult Deficit: Analysis and Speculation”
Status: Accepted (votes: 13/3, yes/no)“Market Failures in Science”
Status: Accepted (votes: 18/6, yes/no)"Building a Brain: An Introduction to Narrative Complexity, a language & internal dialogue-based theory of human consciousness"
Status: Accepted (votes: 7/5, yes/no)“On Scaling Academia”
Status: Accepted (votes: 16/6, yes/no)“Creation of a Conscious Artificial Ego”
Status: Rejected (votes: 9/11, yes/no)“The Death of the Scientific Method? Understanding in an Age of Machine Learning”
Status: Accepted (vote: 25/4, yes/no)“Function of “Memes” in Adolescent Communication: A Theoretical Review”
Status: Accepted, in revision (vote: 12/7, yes/no)“The Prospect of Extracting Brain-Region-Specific Exosomes in the Human Bloodstream”
Status: Accepted, Published (vote: 14/1, yes/no)“Copies and Random Decision: a proposal to peacefully solve the conflict around looted art”
Status: Accepted, Published (vote: 22/13, yes/no)