Science is at the core of our company, and we believe that open science is better science. While the traditional thinking is that profitability and openness are at odds, we think that sharing our research is, in fact, directly aligned with our goals. Science is an inherently collaborative craft — any scientist knows the benefits and impact of discussing their work with colleagues. Insights from those with differing expertise is often key to unlocking tricky problems and truly innovating. It’s also a great way to figure out whether your work is useful to others.
In light of this, one of the first decisions we made as a company was that we’d share a lot of our science, but not in journals or on preprint servers. We thought the best way to develop a publishing strategy fit for our goals would be to experiment, and we wanted to push beyond existing, narrow solutions. Though preprints solve many of the problems in traditional publishing by making work available earlier and without a paywall, we want to push further and explore different formats, displays, and feedback mechanisms. We want to think clearly about our practical needs and avoid letting the means become the end. That said, we’re also making note of what hasn’t worked in the past to make sure other publishing efforts inform our strategy.
By fully separating from established approaches, we’ve stripped away many assumptions, forced ourselves to define what matters to us more clearly, and expanded the range of what’s possible.
We’re optimizing our approach around our own goals, but we ultimately hope to make meaningful change for others as well. There’s a dearth of options out there for those with similar goals, especially scientists at for-profit companies, and we want to provide ideas for anyone else not served by the current publishing landscape. Arcadia, which is untethered from the academic system, is in a unique position to leverage the science in-house to demonstrate what’s possible. We have an unparalleled opportunity to reset, learn from innovations already happening in the open science community, and construct something radically new.
We’re conceptualizing our publishing efforts as an “experiment” that will involve ideation, testing, analysis, and adjustments based on initial results. By repeating the process, we can iteratively improve our model. Critically, we’re doing this iteration closely with our in-house scientists, striving to design a new system that achieves our high-level goals and meets the practical requirements of the researchers themselves. We want them to feel a strong sense of agency and have the ability to discuss their work on their own terms, avoiding new obstructions to sharing. We still have high expectations about the quality of their work, and they’re responsible for thinking hard about how publishing ladders up to our big-picture company goals. Our scientists will learn how to drive scientific dialogue on their own, a skill that will serve them throughout their careers. Further, we’re sharing our plans, progress, and results here so others can weigh in and learn from our work, just as we hope will happen for our scientific research.
While we want to make an impact beyond Arcadia, we think timely, open sharing will help us meet our goals as a for-profit science company. We hypothesize that working openly and routinely engaging with the rest of the scientific community will help expand our thinking, influence our direction, and speed our progress. There will be some research we hold back when essential for commercialization, but the vast majority of our work (especially tools and early-stage discovery efforts) can be accelerated and more useful when shared and discussed publicly. If we’re able to validate this hypothesis, we’re hopeful that other companies will appreciate the value of the model and adopt it, improving science as a whole.
After assessing the key limitations of the current system and our goals as a company, we’ve pinpointed three key qualities to maximize in our publishing strategy:
Speed. Sharing smaller, more modular pieces of research as we go will let people learn about and use our findings quicker and will speed scientific progress as a whole.
Utility. By breaking from rigid journal formatting, we can maximize usability and explore interactivity. Our data will be easy to find, access, use, and repurpose in ways we can’t predict.
Rigor. We need public comments from anyone. Expertise lives everywhere, not just where you look for it. With diverse feedback and iterative engagement, our work will be the best it can be and we can meet community needs.
Since we wanted to share ideas as quickly as possible and let others try our publishing approach, we decided to use a pre-existing platform to host our first research products. We chose the platform you’re on now — PubPub!
For an overview of why we chose this platform and how we set things up in this first iteration, check out our intro piece:
Traditional metrics fail to reflect the true value of scientific work, especially in open science initiatives like ours. We’re seeking feedback on new ways to measure and communicate the impact of research! Share your ideas to better assess the quality and usefulness of openly published work, and inspire others to rethink how we do this for publications across the board.
Fifty pubs and two years into our publishing experiment, we’ve made many improvements to our approach. But this inadvertently led us away from our original vision of scientists sharing their ideas, findings, and challenges at a pace that can accelerate their research.
At this juncture, we’ve committed to a new phase of our experiment in publishing — shifting from a more top-down approach to a bottom-up framework where our scientists are expected to decide how and when they share their work. This means scientists will need to fully own the publishing process and take a more proactive role in thinking about their communication strategy as well as scientific and commercial implications around sharing. As long as they include the code, data, and other content needed to replicate the work and all byline contributors sign off, we’ll release it.
Our pub team, translation and IP experts, and other Arcadians are developing strategies to make this easier for our scientists while upholding overarching company goals. We’ll be sharing more about these other perspectives in future pubs here.
In the following pub, we share some observations and perspectives from our co-founders and publishing team. We also lay out the basics of what the next chapter of our open science experiment will test:
We’d like to continue exploring what the platform itself can do, try much smaller or very different-looking pub formats, and experiment with how AI can speed up our sharing workflows. Longer-term, we’d like to enhance discoverability, facilitate other groups using the platform and sharing more openly, and develop new ways to measure our impact.