João Batalha, cofounder of Fermat's Library, discusses publication bias and the lack of incentive for academic researchers to publish failed experiments.
Insight
João Batalha: Accessible scientific writing enables cross-disciplinary discovery
“You always benefit if you can make it as clear and accessible as possible because you never know, like the audience that is going to be, end up reading your paper. You can, you, of course you can expect that the people in your field are going to read it, but s…”
Insight
João Batalha: Major scientific discoveries often spread without accumulating high paper citations
“Sometimes very important well, this is more specific for certain fields, very important concepts or discoveries never really get published in one paper that then gets a ton of citations, or it, that knowledge gets spread, In some other way. And so there are, y…”
Opinion
João Batalha: Academic peer review requires significant reform to match modern workflows
“The system nowadays, it's, does not seem to be perfect for the way things work nowadays, and we would love to see either via format or some other platform to try to tackle that, and try to do something to make the peer review a better system, or to change it s…”
Insight
João Batalha: Paper authors often make poor annotators due to internalized knowledge
“What's interesting is that well, the authors of the paper sometimes, you know, they are not going to know where people are going to struggle understanding the paper, oftentimes.
I remember when I was annotating the Ethereum white paper, right?
Written by Vita…”
Assertion Supported
João Batalha: arXiv grew linearly, not exponentially, despite huge impact
“If you look at the graph of submissions for Archive, it's completely almost linear. It's, there's no startup exponential, artistic growth. It's like, completely linear, but it's arguably one of the things that has had the most or that has impacted the making o…”
Insight
João Batalha: Dense academic papers produce valuable user notes to decipher steps
“We thought there was a lot of content that, that you end up producing while you're trying to read a paper, which can be the most, like, the most dense piece of content that a human can read sometimes, right? The language can be incredibly spartan, and sometime…”