The Problem: Science Research and Scientific Journals Are Inaccessible

Science Ease is a crowdsourced platform that aims to translate and aggregate scientific research, making it more accessible and more likely to be implemented by practitioner and policymaker alike.

If innovation is the engine that drives economic growth, basic science is the fuel.  In the U.S. alone, government agencies annually spend ~$130B on science funding. However, despite its centrality to the economy and the huge resources invested in it, research too often sits on the shelves for reasons of accessibility. The typical layman with limited knowledge of research design and jargon gains little from reading them. Unfortunately, only weak and informal mechanisms exist to turn new knowledge into practical gain.

The problem is especially acute where the public value of the research far exceeds the private, appropriable value.  To illustrate: suppose a Booth professor came up with a new auction design that, if implemented by Amazon, would be worth $400M.  There is little doubt that somehow, whether via the professor’s private consulting firm or media reports, Amazon would manage to find the idea and implement it.  In contrast, take an idea like Booth professor Eric Budish’s discrete-time fix for high frequency trading. It has high social returns—ones that are highly distributed—and only a few firms (those specializing in HFT) suffer from it.  Scientific findings like these, where the benefits are mostly to those who would not read the research, can be lost in translation.

The Solution: A Crowdsourced Platform for Translating and Sharing Research

Science Ease is designed to alleviate these issues, through the power of the crowd. Science Ease will serve as a centralized resource through which scientists, innovators, and everyday people will interact to translate state-of-the-art scientific findings into language that everyone can understand. It will operate on a non-profit model, funding itself primarily through donations and running at a low cost. Instead of an economic profit, the site will aim to raise awareness about cutting-edge scientific findings for average, everyday people.

The platform operates on a Wiki 2.0 model, using editors at the top of the stack, responsible for pushing publishable content to the public site, and contributors below, constantly working on the backend to refine the content in an iterative fashion.  This Editor/Contributor structure is critical in ensuring that the quality is implementation-ready and to avoid things like political fights over the minimum wage (as would happen in a Wiki 1.0 model).  Moreover, unlike traditional handbooks or meta-research articles, using the crowd allows the tone to step away from the jargon that dominates academia while also ensuring that the content can be updated real-time, rather than on a publisher’s schedule.

To attract contributors, the site will begin by partnering with scientists who are looking to increase the profile of their work (particularly research whose findings would benefit the general public). We would then work with their teams (and potentially hire some initial contributors) to translate that research into easy-to-understand, interesting web pages. Once enough publically beneficial research is made accessible, we would focus on attracting users through press outreach, partnerships with policy-makers, and potentially advertising. Once enough readers and contributors joined the site, a critical threshold would be reached where the most excited readers will become contributors, and the quality would improve, attracting additional readers.

Demonstration: Turn a Publicly Beneficial Discovery into Action

There are two ways we can demonstrate the product. To convince investors or critical decision makers, we would do a simple experiment: show them sections of text from research articles as well as some from Science Ease (without identifying which is which). We would then ask them to evaluate how well they understand the texts and how important they are. These results would show just how powerful Science Ease can be, both from the perspective of making things accessible and showing how research can be important for everyone.

In order to test the broad efficacy of this platform, we will experiment first with just a single discrete idea – Budish’s high-frequency trading fix, mentioned above.  The solution, to be undertaken by a trading exchange like NASDAQ or BATS, is already outlined in Budish’s work.  Therefore, this experiment will test our central theory that the main barriers to the idea taking hold in reality are the barriers to understanding it, and by extension the current inability of anyone but Budish himself to advocate for the idea.  Over a six-month period, with Eric and two of his colleagues acting as Editors, we will invite Contributors from around the world to contribute to a centralized article summarizing Eric’s research, and outlining the specific policy and practice steps necessary to implement it.  Should our theories hold, the outcome to be measured is whether indeed any trading exchanges implement the idea.