ResearchHub product update — 8/24/22
Building a question & answer bounty feature, hosting SciCon2022, and making incremental UI improvements
Q&A on ResearchHub
Since the last product update, we have been focused on taking a stab at validating potential revenue streams for ResearchHub. After consulting the community, everyone agreed that building a scientific question & answer feature fueled by ResearchCoin bounties would be an interesting first experiment.
In order to launch this feature, the first thing we had to do was ship a new question post-type. Here’s what it looks like:
The next step was to allow users to create RSC bounties associated with their questions in order to incentivize anyone from the ResearchHub community to post a good answer. Here are some examples of questions that have been asked so far. Some even have RSC bounties attached!
Once another user has posted an answer the question asker can “accept” it. That accepted answer will be highlighted in the discussion section. If there’s a bounty attached to the question, the accepted answer will also be rewarded with the corresponding amount of RSC.
Here’s an example of a bounty and an accepted answer:
A bounty feature lends itself perfectly to generating revenue for both ResearchHub, Inc. and the ResearchHub community. To get started, we applied a 9% administration fee to bounties executed via ResearchHub.com. Of this, 7% flows to Researchhub Inc. and 2% flows to the ResearchHub community’s multi-sig wallet.
Here’s what it looks like when you add a bounty to your question:
Since this feature’s release, we have already seen over 7000 RSC committed to question bounties!
SciCon 2022
At the end of July, the ResearchHub community hosted our first online event! SciCon 2022 sought to bring together leaders in both metascience and DeSci to discuss the issues that exist in research and highlight web3-focused efforts to create a better future for academic science.
We had an incredible lineup of speakers spanning July 23rd and 24th. I’m probably a little biased, but here is a video of my personal favorite talk from the conference if you’re curious:
If you would like to catch up on any of the other talks from the weekend, the ResearchHub YouTube channel has recordings of all the plenary talks given on Saturday and Sunday!
As a part of SciCon we also hosted two separate content creation competitions, present your research (PYR) and the ELN competition. Big-time congratulations go out to Riccardo Goldoni, who won 1st place in both of these competitions. Check out his posts here:
1st place in the PYR competition: Wearable intraoral sensors and biosensors for noninvasive salivary diagnostics
1st place in the ELN competition: Revamping the scientific paper: Paper Backbone, Key References and the Reproducibility Score
We have a hack-a-thon on the horizon, so stay tuned for future ResearchHub events! If you’re interested in helping to organize our next event, then stop by the RH community Discord server and say hi: discord.gg/researchhub
Improving the site’s UI
In addition to the above, we also shipped a ton of smaller UI improvements to ResearchHub.
- We added a new post UI to be a dropdown from a modal
- We updated our homepage to be a fixed width at large screen sizes
- Video uploads were added to our notebook
- We improved our Open Access logic so the site will be more accurate on if the PDF of papers are allowed to be uploaded based on their license
- We fixed some issues around in-application notifications
As always if there are any additional features or improvements you would like to see on ResearchHub please let us know by sending a message to hello@researchhub.com or by dropping in our community Discord server!
If you are interested in contributing to ResearchHub’s mission of accelerating the pace of scientific research — join us by signing up at https://www.researchhub.com/
