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.
I see a huge opportunity for how the AT Protocol could reshape academic publishing. Imagine researchers publishing continuously and atomically ā before, during, and after research projects ā in public connected continuous streams of discovery and insight.
Some notes on how we can make Leaflet more useful for scientists and academic communities ā touching on things like annotation, standalone doc publishing, new block types, post reactions, references & backlinksā¦ Second in a series, and intended as a living doc ā we'd love to hear your thoughts!
Towards Leaflet for Scientists
Lab Notes 011: ideas for now we might make Leaflet better for scientists, researchers, and academic communities
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...
Intros and kickoff thread for ATProto x Science
Hey there! My name is Ethan, I am a Research Software Engineer at the Open Molecular Software Foundation wherein I am trying to modernize our software teamsā DevOps flows. My background is primarily i...
Time to de-enshittify research publishing
I see a huge opportunity for how the AT Protocol could reshape academic publishing. Imagine researchers publishing continuously and atomically ā before, during, and after research projects ā in public connected continuous streams of discovery and insight.
Some notes on how we can make Leaflet more useful for scientists and academic communities ā touching on things like annotation, standalone doc publishing, new block types, post reactions, references & backlinksā¦ Second in a series, and intended as a living doc ā we'd love to hear your thoughts!
I would love to brainstorm with you a bit. We are running a scientific content standards workshop at the end of next week. Would you by chance have a small amount of time early next week to chat?
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!
Verifiable identities, the PDS, shared lexicons for documents, data, and soon maybe peer review and indexing, plus labelers and moderation lists to surface quality, uphold research integrity, mitigate bad actors, and feeds to support discovery.
I think we should dogfood from day 1 by starting The International Journal of Authenticated Takes. We accept publications in multiple lexica that are AT-relevant, and we publish as a peer-review overlay journal.