In fact, this is being done now (49). The problem is that the company in question, Research Square, guarantees a review within 3 weeks using a scorecard and pending the payment of $750 to Nature Publishing Group. In this model, the incentive is shifted to get the review out quickly, rather than provide more thorough review! I see this model resulting only in profits for the company at the expense of more adequate reviews.

So we may now imagine a scenario where the cumulative effect of small microtransactions subsidized by viewership may be able to offset the paywall problem while open-access publishing continues to gain ground. Eventually, these payments can be transitioned into subsidizing the peer-review and editing processes, which would hopefully improve the overall quality and assessment of papers that get published. In this scenario, a free-market system evolves to fund the journals that publish the best work, although the established giants in the field (Cell, Nature, Science) would have a clear upper-hand. Perhaps this scenario would not work out as easily as I am talking about now, since the leaders in high quality content are already well established. Or perhaps this would help to break down the broken system of impact scores, as Nobel laureate Randy Schekman suggests (50). Interestingly, this forum would also open up the idea of scientists being able to self-publish their ideas to a broader audience, aside from just starting a blog like this.

It’s also possible that the fee revenue can be used to actually offset the cost of publishing from the lab that produced its work. After all, the lab has to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars just to publish. Now, instead of subsidizing the journal directly, we can actually subsidize the lab that produced the work. Did your lab have a cool paper in a lesser known journal that was worth discussing? If the readers of the paper are intrigued by the work, or the study is picked up by the media, they will generate viewership and discussion, thus subsidizing the costs to actually publish. A nice kickback for conducting an interesting or important study. How’s that for “donate to fund cancer research?” (hint: most of your money isn’t actually going to fund cancer research, which is an entirely different issue that I won’t go into, 51). Alternatively, and perhaps the most realistic option, these fees may be used to pay forum moderators (discussed below). Could this work? I don’t know…it’s important to keep in mind these are simply ideas.

6. How to handle trolls, spam, shills. Couldn’t a corporate entity still pay off shills to make comments on posts in favor of their own business or agenda? Indeed, the use of money in politics and media is well known for pushing agendas and the idea that many of the comments that you read online are actually made by people that are paid to do so has been floating around for quite some time. While I don’t believe this problem can be completely avoided, there are ways to curtail its effectiveness.

In the early days of e-mail, spam mail was a huge problem. The reason for this was simple: e-mails are free to send. Before the advent of Google’s powerful spam filters, many industry leaders such as Bill Gates proposed imposing a small payment in order to send e-mail. While the average user wouldn’t mind paying a penny to send an e-mail, a spam mailer would certainly have trouble dishing out the money to spam millions of addresses at a time. But as discussed in this article (52), this solution isn’t cut and dry. Interestingly, one of the payment ideas was instead of money, usage of computing time to solve a problem could be used before sending e-mails. Sound familiar? This was possible at the time via Adam Back’s Hashcash system, which is the basis for Bitcoin’s proof-of-work scheme (see video, 53).

While spam filters eventually eroded away the necessity for an e-mail payment system, the same principle applies in our situation. By imposing a fee to enter and access a forum thread’s content, a corporate entity may be dissuaded from paying these fees in addition to the person making the comments. In this way, we monetarily discourage spamming, trolling, or shilling.

Perhaps the best way to actually reduce this is through effective moderation. In all successful forums, a reliable and effective moderation team is key. Moderators of a science forum would be real scientists that would moderate a sub-forum of their expertise. For instance, a neuroscientist would moderate a sub-forum that deals in neuroscience. Because of a moderator’s overall familiarity with the subject matter, it would be easy for him/her to spot replies in a thread that cite pseudoscience – an article like this (54), for instance, which may otherwise be up-voted in a less strictly moderated environment.

In order to get effective moderation, the team would need to be incentivized. As previously mentioned, the fees used to access the thread could be used as payment to the moderators for their work. Moderators can additionally comment themselves and be “tipped” by other users to earn additional payment and contribute to the thread. Because I have moderator status on Reddit, I know first hand how overrun the comments are with unnecessary jokes, anecdotes, pseudoscience, and incorrect information. Moderators on Reddit do a pretty good job keeping things clean (largely through the use of AutoModerator bots that recognize and delete posts with key words) for just doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. If moderator teams are monetarily incentivized, the results could be dramatically improved. I imagine a moderator position on this forum to take the role of an editor at a journal. The position would be subsidized by fees as an incentive and moderators could serve democratic “terms” with limits such that we don’t have a situation where moderators can sway the tone of the subreddit without consequence. If this is successful, it could even be a real job for those that care about science education and writing – a growing job market due to the stagnating availability of positions in academia.

Lastly, a huge factor in trolling and shilling on internet forums is the fact that the commenter is anonymous. As I have previously discussed, anonymity is not desirable in a serious forum setting. Certainly anyone who claims to be a scientist will have to be verified accordingly and post under their real name/affiliation – similar to Reddit’s flair system, but only with a user name reflective of your actual identity. But should all commenters be anonymous? This is a question that is hard to answer. On one hand, you sacrifice the privacy of your users by collecting and verifying their identifying information. Additionally, a “power user” that frequently makes good posts may actually make a decent amount of money and be more vulnerable to hacking attempts to steal identifying information or money in their linked wallets. In this day and age, privacy is virtually lost, but people are starting to care more. On the other hand, you make an environment that further discourages trolling and shilling. Perhaps a compromise is what many websites and social media applications use – connecting accounts through “verified” or linked accounts such as Facebook or LinkedIn. In this way, it is harder to generate hundreds of new accounts while also easy enough and less invasive than something like the Know Your Customer regulations that banks and businesses use (55).

I believe that the combination of these three factors will work synergistically to oppose trolling and shilling in the proposed forum environment.

7. Submissions. The model used for submissions on the Let’s Talk Bitcoin network (discussed below) is well structured and could be applied to our previous Bitcoin model as well. Essentially, unless you are an approved submitter with proper permissions, you will have to pay a fee to submit an article or press release. This helps reduce spam submissions and likely would increase quality submissions. Depending on how your submission does based on upvotes/likes by other users, the user that created the submission would earn back their fees and actually make a profit for their submission. We can structure the earnings based on the ratios or amounts of upvotes/likes that the submission earns.

This incentivizes users to add-on to their submissions such that they have a higher likelihood of stimulating discussion and being up-voted by other users to the front page. Let’s say I want to submit a press release from Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute on a new study. Instead of just posting a link to the press release, I attach a DOI number (56) linking the primary research article (hopefully accessible to all – discussed in 5) as well as a summary of the actual article, in my own words. This encourages users to submit articles that are in their field, such that they can give a summary and interpretation of the data presented within – kick-starting a discussion for users entering the thread. Here, we again rely on an incentive to exist for users to earn back their submission fees and profit from their submissions, which in turn filters out lower quality content for higher quality submissions. Another example would be asking for help with a technique. Rather than just asking, “I can’t get my Western to work – help!!” the user making the submission would explain what they have done so far, what protocols they are following, and what resources they have already used for troubleshooting.

8. Content Copying. Wouldn’t a paying user just be able to access the thread, take a screenshot, and post the image online for others to view for free? One of the downsides of a forum on the internet is that digital information is easy to copy. This has been a problem since the dawn of the internet, as the attempts to stop the downloading and sharing of digital music content ironically led to the developmental progression of Napster, Limewire, and eventual Bittorrent. Sharing of content on the internet is inevitable, but there are a few reasons why this issue may not be such a big deal, and it all relates back to the main point: incentives.

Because cryptocurrency enables microtransactions, we are now able to adjust payments to miniscule amounts, which not only enables the monetary incentive structure that I have described, but also disincentivizes stealing of content. The reason for this is simple: if it only costs $0.25 to view the content you want, is it really worth stealing? While I don’t discount the screenshot and posting scenario described, the ability to pay such small amounts with a single click of the mouse in order to access the content is so easy to do that the vast majority of users will do it. In an age where 7 second Vine videos can thrive due to the shortening attention span of humans on the internet, surely a single click and a $0.10 fee will be preferable to minutes searching Google for the copied content.

Another underrated, yet important aspect is that of donations and altruism. One of the best examples of this is podcasts, which have seen tremendous growth in listeners over the past few years (57).