About OneSci

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OneSci aims to be a science news source that reads like a newspaper, allows open user commentary like a blog, provides experimental methods like a lab protocol book, and is conducive for professional networking like a research conference. OneSci will be free and open access, forever.

There is a large community of professional researchers and scientists without a homepage. Should we pool our efforts, we can build a website that is both entertaining and essential. The OneSci Network is an online research community built and operated by active scientists across a multitude of scientific disciplines with one broad mission: building a web-portal that shares useful and important scientific news, ideas, and tools amongst fellow researchers.




The OneSci Network is an online research community built and operated by active scientists and researchers across various scientific disciplines. OneSci has many specific goals under one broad mission: building a web-portal that encompasses all things considered useful for conducting research.


What we hope to accomplish across a relative time-line:

  • Continue improving the website model
    • Add resources that naturally appeal to researchers
      • Daily Science News
      • Protocols and Methods Library
      • Conference Posters
      • Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
      • Integration of Research Software (e.g. Applets for Molecular Modeling, NeuroInformatics, Brain Imaging Tools, etc.)
  • Recruit active scientists and researchers
  • Invite entire labs to make use of the secure lab-space (example)


Benefits of signing up to be a OneSci Member (registration shall always be free)



Contents

Why does OneSci Exist?

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific information. For the first time ever, we have the ability to institute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge - collected, cataloged, written, and reviewed by scientists - with the guarantee of worldwide access. Yet, we have a science based on tradition which, as non-idealistic as it sounds, has a fairly good track record of eliminating submissions of random computer generated text. This system, however:

  1. costs researchers upwards of 30 billion dollars per year
  2. confiscates the copyright permissions to all scientific research
  3. is accessible almost exclusively to university-affiliated faculty and staff (not the public)
  4. puts all this money into the hands of large multinational publishing corporations (instead of recycling the money back into the scientific process).

In turn, these publishing companies essentially provide two things: 1) they organize the peer review process (with no monetary compensation for reviewers, mind you); and 2) they have printing presses. The solution might seem too obvious, but here it is anyway: stop publishing for companies that take copyright permissions from you and your colleagues; start publishing and reviewing for journals that protect the authors' research under a GNU open access license.

One - Change is Inevitable

Our peer-reviewed publishing system is built on trust. Trust that authors faithfully carry out their stated experiments, trust that reviewers objectively evaluate said experiments, and trust that publishing companies oversee such processes with an eye toward disseminating legitimate scientific findings. What happens when all three break down?

We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance. We know this is a task that will take inside of a decade to accomplish fully. We don't expect established principle investigators to jump right into publishing to online journals.

However, if you too agree that publishing companies are taking too much control and money from the scientific process, and there exists a better solution to the publishing process, here are ways you can help:

  • bookmark this website
  • visit as often as you can for science news and information
  • spread the word about OneSci policy on GNU Peer Reviewed publishing
  • if you have scientifically sound, yet unpublishable data, submit it to the OneSci Journal
  • contribute posters you've presented at various conferences
  • share a good protocol
  • sign up to do a peer review or two


Science performed in isolation is useless. Only through rich scientific discourse can we reach our maximum potential for efficiency and progress. Onesci.com was founded on this simple principle and is committed to facilitating communication between scientists of every discipline. We welcome you to join the conversation.


Bradley Monakhos and Jeremy Biane

Two - Science is Science

We've all had 'em.

Those studies where p = 0.08; maybe you couldn't reproduce findings from another study; perhaps that interesting pilot study got triaged by the "more important" research priorities never to be followed-up on again. Maybe the findings were negative and the null hypothesis is *gasp* true. Whatever the case, in their pursuit of an ever-increasing impact factor, journals invariably eschew such findings, leaving a large and vital chunk of scientific inquiry unshared.

One of the main purposes of this site is to disseminate findings that, despite sound scientific method, do not reach threshold for traditional publication.

The website is growing quickly but is still relatively young, so we invite you to share any thoughts about the future direction of onesci.com and what this site might try to accomplish under this general idea on the Recorded potentials page (you must sign up to edit).


Three - The Sooner The Better

Would you like to join us? Membership is free!

To qualify for membership you need to provide some proof of holding PhD, MD, or have an article published in a peer reviewed scientific journal. We reserve the right to make exceptions to this criteria (and even change the criteria) if we feel that it would be within the best interest of our current members.

  1. To sign up, read this list and then go here or click the "Sign In" link at the top.
  2. Fill out the requested info
  3. Provide a link to some sort of proof of qualification in the biography section.
  4. Once approved by the admins, you will be sent an email conformation.
  5. Copy the temporary password provided in the email and follow the link back to onesci.com
  6. Sign in to change your password, edit, create a profile, etc.
  7. We will provide details about sharing your work after your first log-in.

It's really easy. We hope you decide to become part of our community!

All information published here is covered under the GNU free documentation license, which starts:

“ The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others. This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software. ”
If you publish your work on this site
  • You have full legal protection by the GNU license
  • You remain the owner of your work
  • You shall be credited for use of unmodified versions of your work

Four - It must be Citation Worthy

  1. This website is not Wikipedia.
  2. This website is not like Wikipedia.
  3. This website cannot be edited by just any random person.
  4. Our editors are not the average Wikipedian.
  5. Our editors have higher than average intelligence.
  6. Our editors are scientists and researchers.
  7. Our editors must have a PhD, MD, or be published in a peer reviewed scientific journal.

Wikipedia does not want original research. They actually have a policy called WP:NOR, which states "Wikipedia does not publish original research or original thought. This includes unpublished facts, arguments, speculation, and ideas; and any unpublished analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position."

OneSci wants original research. Not only that, we want you to talk endlessly about your original research. We want a lengthy discussion to start about your original research. We want debate. Most importantly, one way or another, we want the next experiment that any researcher performs to be positively impacted in some way by their willingness to share ideas with their peers on this site.



There is a wealth of tools and information available on the internet. However, it is not well cataloged and the right tool might be difficult to locate because search engines use "text-based" search algorithms.
This site aims to inform the researcher about the many tools useful for conducting research.



An active exchange of ideas is the basis of the internet. There has risen one successful forum after another for the exchange of daily thoughts and giving immediate feedback (e.g. facebook, youtube, myspace). Many scientists have established online identities for their personal lives, but have not attempted to create an accessible online professional identity.
There is no website that cultivates a platform for the online establishment of a professional scientist identity. We hope to fostering such a platform by providing each researcher who becomes part of onesci.com their own homepage, talk page, blog, and drop-box. They will also be given nearly infinite space to share their research and talk/collaborate with other members of their field.



A neuroscience graduate student at UCSD is having trouble with recording neurons in real time; a biochemistry post-doc at Washington University has developed an apparatus that would work for just such an experiment. These two might never meet.
This should never happen. We want to build this bridge.



This site is not Wikipedia! Did we say that already? Wikipedia discussion pages are only for comments about how to improve the editorial content of a given article.
OneSci will also encourage comments about how to improve editorial content; however, we hope these articles will inspire ideas for advancing the research itself, and the discussion pages will be open for commentary of this nature as well!
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