Step 1. Find collaborators.
Here we go... š¤
Yesterday, I posted a thread to my Bluesky account.
In it, I reach out to a few key figures Iāve discovery and connected with through the platform.
My goal was to find collaborators to experiment with AT Protocol and explore new ways for researchers to publish, share, and collaborate directly on the platform.
tl;dr
You can read the full thread above, but in brief, I believe AT Protocol offers a genuinely exciting foundation for the future of scholarly communication and research communities.
The core elements are already in place. Open standards ensure transparency and long-term accessibility, allowing research outputs to remain compatible across systems. Data interoperability makes it possible to connect tools, repositories, and datasets without platform lock-in. Collaboration tools enable open exchange between researchers while maintaining clear attribution. Individual ownership through personal data servers (PDS) gives users full control over their content and identity forever.
Verifiable identities tie authors to their work across platforms, enabling persistent attribution and reputation. Shared lexicons can define publication contexts (publishers, journals, preprints...), new and existing document formats (abstracts, papers, proceedings), even peer reviews themselves, so research artefacts can be discovered, cited, and built upon consistently. Labelers and moderation lists help surface credible work and uphold research integrity. Feeds and Lists provide a way to disseminate findings, and discover new developments, and make new connections in real time.
Publishing in this way could enable researchers to share work transparently and collaborativelyāwithout fear of being scooped or losing rightsāwhile strengthening careers and communities.
Excitement, plus a little trepidation
I always feel a bit conflicted about making posts like this in publicāespecially when tagging (spamming) folks who have far more experience in these areas than I do.
It's never fun exposing myself to the potential for tumbleweeds, but Iām genuinely drawn to the possibility. And actually the response was pretty positive.
I spent the past 5 years working on a VC-funded platform that aimed to revolutionise academic publishing. Looking back, I can see it was destined to fail because the core driver of that work was to preserve the status quo and extract value for shareholders.
(I'm not against profit, it must come as a reward for a meaningful change for the better)
The upside was spending time with authors, editors, reviewers, integrity investigators, librarians, and fundersālearning about their goals and frustrations. Coming from outside academia gave me a different vantage point: I felt I could see the forest for the trees.
The early responses suggest Iām not alone in this thinking. Thatās really encouragingāit gives me both confidence and motivation to take this further.
Finding the small ATProto Science community was definitely the most exciting outcome of the day.
Now, if I could make one wish š§ it's for a little funding to focus on this work properly. Baby steps!
Responses
@ronentk.me and @tgoerke.bsky.social have done an intro post in the forum discourse.atprotocol.community/t/intros-and...
Atomic, continuous publishing is exactly what weāre building at @curvenote.com and @continuous.foundation! Totally the future. But will be a huge norm shift for scientists from spending two years writing one big paper that then takes two more years to publish.
Midway through an intriguing š§µ on the suitability for #atproto as a substrate for #ContinuousPublishing as an alternate model for disseminating scientific research Might someday span the gaps between: - microblogging, - preprints, + - traditional published papers Vannevar would be so proud!
