Congrats Bryan!!

I hear ya! I mean more on the “we” rather than “I” personally in some of these sentiments. Again, this is not meant as a substitute for things we do or aught to do already but something that can augment. Also, just an idea to stimulate conversations.

I like your ideas, just trying to think of ways that I can donate my “time” to help specific labs/areas that might even be outside of my immediate area of expertise. Seems like having a universal currency for science might have some uses. It’s obviously imperfect, but maybe could refine the ideas.

I think the idea is that you can compensate others with your credits/tokens like pay for reagents (service contracts on equipment!!). There are lots of misc expenses in running a lab that add up!

May not push the incentives to a point where people will review more, but at least extend the effort of the review to benefit not only the authors (or the journals) but broaden impact to others through the peer review process. It’s like volunteering time and using earned credits to give to others.

Looks like there is some momentum to this concept: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The problem is that people don’t have time to review. It’s not clear how you easily “fact check” papers in bio (unless there are massive flaws). Critiques of strengths & weaknesses are still useful. Most people aren’t volunteering time to review biorxiv papers. Maybe this system can be an incentive.

Credits used back to invest in science community rather than on direct personal benefit.

I recognize that this idea is still underdeveloped but wanted to start share it here. Would love to hear feedback and find people willing to help do something like this! Thanks for reading! (9/9)

I can imagine this framework on a blockchain to track credits or tokens and you can have people invest in buying the tokens directly to further add to this community (basically a donation). Lots of ways to grow this organically. The economics need to be figured out in more detail. (8/9)

Importantly you can DONATE these credits to other labs or entities. What if there’s a cool project from another lab that I want to support? I can donate my science credits to them so it can advance the science. You basically converted ↔️ PR time/effort into communal goods for sharing w/ others. (7/9)

The SOLUTION:💡What if we gave reviewers some type of “science credits” after peer review. Sci-credits can be exchanged for all kinds of science related activities. For example: publication fees, society/conference fees, discount on purchasing reagents or repair cost of equipment. (6/9)

The NEED: a fair, equitable, and transparent framework to compensate referee’s time and effort in peer review 👍. This could help make PR higher quality, attract better reviews and more motivated reviewers (maybe?) (5/9)

Direct cash 💵 compensation for PR is not good as it has obvious perverse incentives. But most people hate to review a paper (for “free”) and then later get charged $10k+ to publish in a journal. Some journals have small discounts, but those don’t move the needle. (4/9)

But most referees 🧑‍💻 agree to review a paper out of sense of duty, perceived obligation to the journal/editor, the topic area, the specific paper, or even the authors (or combo of the above). Some people do more PR than others. Most people I know don’t review 3x the # of papers they publish/yr. (3/9)

The PROBLEM: Peer review (PR) is poorly incentivized. Reviewing papers take time, no one has time⌛️, and referees don’t get properly compensated for this work (often hours to days, stretched over months to years). People participate in PR because it’s a ‘communal good’ to keep science going. (2/9)

Email me if you want to chat! One key thing is to serially wash a few times by resuspending the filtered cells off the filter. I recall membrane filters (polycarbonate, laser etched) work a lot better than depth filters (nylons, PE, etc). I tried a bunch of different filters to get one that worked.

You can wash a Ecoli culture from LB well enough to get rid of all the media and do electroporation (very sensitive to salts) so it’s quite doable. We used this design to build out the MAGE2.0 machine at the Wyss Institute. I can send you unpublished chapter from my thesis if you want more details.

I have your answer: Use sterile 0.22um filter (polycarbonate or PP) filter plates with a vacuum manifold. You can filter about 2-3ml of OD~1 cells (~2-3x10^9) before the filter gets clogged. You can wash cells directly on filter membrane by resuspension with multichannel pipette.

I generally avoid service contracts. If I need them that much then the instrument is probably not that reliable… only exception is Illumina sequencers, which are built to break and hook you on the service contract.