Bottom Line Up Front

1. What is CiviSci

   1. A site building a new approach to scientific research using crowd-sourcing and bounty style crowd-funding for parallel runs of research.

2. What Currently Exists

   1. A public alpha build exists at CiviSci.com. LLC pending. Youtube and X(fmr. twitter) profiles with 3 live videos.

3. What does this campaign buy

   1. This campaign is to help fund the beta build which then positions CiviSci to be in a place for many more funding opportunities that will then help fund the full 1.0 launch which is where it becomes self funding.

   2. Funds from this project will be used primarily to help with community building/ outreach, development of key features on the site, and improvements to security, stability, and SEO.

4. Who is involved in this campaign

   1. Tyler Foos is the founder and solo member right now. As a part of the beta period build this helps fund he hopes to build a larger team around the project.

5. Why should this exist

   1. Science is in need of improvement & at serious risks if it fails to do so; from the replication crisis to AI, Science is in need of improvement, and for those improvements to work there need to be structural shifts that change incentives rather than just desired changes. If science loses capability or credibility so much of our society that is down-stream of it is at threat.

Project summary

CiviSci is a new approach to scientific research. It uses the concepts of the modern internet to improve scientific research:

1. Crowd-Sourcing: CiviSci Uses crowdsourcing for the early stages of scientific research. Forming questions, developing hypotheses, and designing experiment protocols are designed so that anyone who has question, potential answer, or ideas on how to test that answer can share them and have it iterated upon so that even a non-expert's (or an expert in a adjacent field) idea can be the basic start for scientific discovery.

2. Crowd-Funding: CiviSci Uses crowdfunding in a bounty format to have experiments executed. Once the community develops an experimental protocol users can then donate money to have the experiment ran. We specifically designed the system so that overfunding allows for parallel runs, so if a basic literature costs $50 and it raises $100 then two separate teams can find the experiment and do the same protocol, providing stronger cumulative evidence.

Crowd-Sourcing projects have already shown the ability for fast knowledge progression in collective projects like Wikipedia. The issues with those formats tend to be in accuracy, so applying it to competing provisional objects (asking questions, producing hypotheses, or creating experiment designs) rather than a singular truth (like a wiki page) keeps those issues from proliferating. Crowd-Funding has likewise shown the ability to speed up creative and innovative pursuits by requiring much less time to getting a funded project than traditional means.

Why is it important today?

Science is not in a good place today; Replication rates (if a study can actually generalize results) in many fields have reached crisis level, Scientific progress is slowing down, Research waste is high, and trust in science is low. In order to fix these issues there need to be systemic incentive changes in a way that can compete with the current system by improving actual utility to all participants in science.

1. The Replication Crisis: Science's ability to make accurate predictions and to generalize findings between studies has been found to be quite low in many fields of modern (post WW2) science. This is problematic because replicable results are the core promise that the scientific method is supposed to produce. The reasons for this issue are varied (over-reliance on P-Value statistical significance, publication bias, etc.) but the solution is fairly simple 1.) ensure that all findings can be made public 2.) create a system that makes replication an expected part of the process. CiviSci does this through its crowdfunding format where multiple runs of the same experiential protocol is the expectation with funding with all findings posted publicly next to each other.

2. Progress & Innovation: Recent research has found that scientific progress has been in decline since the post WW2 period. Drug manufacturing is one of the top stories on this with Eroom’s Law showing that "the number of new drugs approved per billion US dollars spent on R&D has halved roughly every 9 years since 1950" meaning that we are spending more and getting less out of our drug research. Another large study recently found that the drop in innovation applies to all science generally; With science producing less new knowledge (as measured primarily by fewer citations to new studies compared to old ones) and less innovation (Measured by verbiage of patents amongst others) from science with the decline becoming steadily worse year-over-year for around a half century. The causes of this decline are debated, but CiviSci Seeks to solve this issue by using the technology that has proven to spur innovation and creativity in other domains. By opening up scientific research to all stakeholders of science in a format that allows early ideas to both exist and professionalize over time we allow for a much faster flow of ideas and by formatting scientific questions in a strict hierarchy (meaning that competing hypotheses of the same question sit right next to each other, and experiments to test each hypothesis are housed inside of the specific hypothesis, with each experiment having multiple runs right next to each other) old ideas can be disrupted by improved ones in a form that is discouraged by current standards of science.

3. Research Waste: Some estimates put as high as 85% of research as "wasted"; Many estimates put roughly half of a scientists time as doing administrative tasks like securing funding rather than doing actual scientific research. Throughout all levels of science there are serious inefficiencies costing significant portions of the nearly trillion dollar research industry (private and public spending) without producing a benefit to society. CiviSci corrects for this by first breaking the steps of the scientific method apart (improving division of labor); Not everyone who can make strong formulations of the scientific questions of the age are necessarily good at answering those questions and finding evidence to back those answers. On CiviSci people can do what they are best at in science, a researcher who is great at running experiments (collecting data, following protocols) can find prefunded experiments ready for them to run, while someone who is good at asking questions or someone who wants to ask a question outside of their field of expertise can do so and have that question answered by the scientific community. It also fixes the waste issue by requiring public posting of findings, by organizing research in a format so that it is easy to find what has already been tested in the field, and by allowing crowdsourced experiment designs to correct errors through iteration before the experiment is ever ran.

4. The issue of Trust: Public trust in science has been a major concern for over a decade now. In so many fields of science doubt or full denialism has been growing; To some extent though, it is warranted if only ~1/3 psychological studies are replicable for example, then it would not be wise to fully trust the evidence from any singular psychological study, also if science is shown to largely be wasteful, with lessening large benefits to society through innovation, then it is justifiable to doubt science as a whole. This problem is only getting worse now that AI is widely being adopted in science, often without reporting and trained on non-scientific data; That's not to say that AI should not be used in science but rather we need to prepare both AI and science for that shift before the negative consequences begin to stack. If we are to improve trust in science, one of the strongest ways is through a structured democratization process where people can justifiably believe that if they see an error or gap, there is a legitimate path for them to fix it (even if they are non-experts) rather than just having a binary choice of accept or deny what they are told. The other key to trust is transparency, CiviSci recognizes that bias can't be removed from humans, so it makes it easy to find: First since every experimental photocall can be re-ran by separate teams as funding allows & the results are all posted right next to each other, deviations are easy to spot; then once curious you can click on the poster's profile and see all the other experiments, hypotheses, questions, or other runs they have done so you can see if there is a trend (aka bias) to their work. This means that bias can now be easily found and corrected for.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

At this stage of the project the goals are intentionally simple to be achievable in a short time frame. The larger goals are still well thought out and are the end point the smaller steps are built around.

1. The Big picture (goals of CiviSci as a whole)

   1. Build a space that can counter balance the issues facing science today: CiviSci is built to correct for the issues facing science today (most of them are in the "why is it important today" section, as are the ways CiviSci addresses them).

   2. Build collaboration in science across institutions, skill-sets (curiosity, logical design, data collection, data analysis, & communication), subject expertise, and individuals more generally.

   3. Allow a space where new, early, novel, or heterodox ideas can be shared and properly/ rigorously tested after being iterated into the strongest version of the idea.

2. This current effort

   1. Growing a community of curious people: The first step to making CiviSci real is to find people who have scientific questions that they have been wanting to ask but don't have a place to, people who have an interesting hypotheses that could answer a serious question that they want to share but don't have data to support it, and the people who love to design experiments to test those answers. Outreach to communities and public thinkers/ researchers is part of this step but is less effective with only cold emails/ posts & more effective with; Content creation is another part of the step but it requires some equipment and sustained efforts to be truly impactful to the algorithm; Targeted adds can also be a large part for this, but they require the most funding.

   2. The Beta build: CiviSci is currently at the Alpha stage. That means it's useable to add content to, but stability is low, many features aren't fully developed, and security & SEO concerns are not fully addressed yet.

      1. Stability of the site: this largely comes down to improving the storage for better hosting of the site. This can be addressed both through funding for external services and more long term though better hardware.

      2. Build out planned features: Many features are currently of limited or only illustrative capacity right now. For example, a robust funding/ donation logic which allows funders to put earmarks as to what types of researcher (affiliation requirements, IRB approval, trust scores, reputation scores, etc.) can get their funds is in a limited capacity right now meaning rather than having complex logic (the person can have a moderate trust score and affiliation or just a very high trust score) it is just simple logic (the person needs to have a minimum trust score and affiliation with a particular type of initiation). Other examples would be better institutional pages and governance, better collective ownership options, better data exports, better science communications sharing, and many others. These features can largely be met by my current coding tools but they do cost to run, especially with these more advanced features which will take longer.

      3. Improve Security: as this site will eventually move real funds through crowd funding, it's paramount that security is at the highest achievable standards by that point. At the current standard build there is virtually no personal information collected so data leaks are not a full concern, but as the site grows more this will get increasingly important. By the time we add genuine funding we will need cybersecurity trained staff to do this right, before that point there are many automated tools I have found that can improve basic security for current lower risk builds of the site.

3. 1.0 Launch: This is when CiviSci is fully realized for the first time. We will need substantial funds to get here in order to have the staff, legal reviews, and other necessities ready. There are many more funding opportunities that become more available once the beta is secure and there is a strong community is active on the site to help get to that point, right now this proposal is about getting the bridge funds that help get us to that point (via the public Beta & community creation) to secure the funds needed for 1.0 development.

How will this funding be used?

This funding will be used primarily to reach the goals in point 2 "This current effort" in the goals section, It will also to a much lesser extent as funds allow help pay for the time it takes to build these goals (e.g., shooting & editing videos for the community building goals, time spent working with coding tools, etc.,).
The goals section lays out what costs exist for each goal and the amount of funds raised will determine what gets prioritized at this point.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Right now I am a solo founder working on this project alone. I've got plans for a team once I have the funds to pay them, but for now it's me and any tool I can get access to.

I've been building solutions to longstanding issues in nearly every job or position I have worked at for most of my life. Rather that's tools for community building, time management, or event demand research during my time as a college Resident Advisor or my time building advanced logic time trackers for during my graduate assistant position running college study program. Even going as far back as middle school my M.O. has always been to find the issues everyone complains about and build a solution to them; CiviSci is my first public attempt since graduating with my M.S. to meet this same challenge at a much larger level.

I came to developing CiviSci while working on a research project focused on the causes of isolation in modern society partially as a part of my class work for Forensic Psychology (isolation is one of the most common variables in most major crimes) and partially out of a personal passion. As I worked on that project, I continuously ran into new questions some of which I could test but some of which I couldn't either because of costs or because it was outside of my area of expertise (for example, one major theory I included in my work was that screen based technology has a suppressive effect on the limbic system that means that there is a rebound in emotionality when the use stops, leading to conditioning that punishes tasks like socializing because they cause the temporary cessation of technology use. That theory had parts in my domain of psychology but also overlapped with neuroscience to a degree that if I wanted to get research for it, I would need to be able to get a neuroscientist to preform part's of the experiments). As I looked for PHD programs & other options that would allow for this work to be done, I noticed that there was a severe lack in the ability to get these kind of ideas that did not serve a direct role in business or governmental objectives (traditional grant makers) funded and done as there were also very few programs that had the kind of interdisciplinary opportunities I would have needed for this project. Through my studies I had met many people who were genius level skilled at conducing research who struggled to find things they wanted to research, people who were overflowing with ideas for research but limited by time on what they could achieve themselves, and people who could use logic to find methodological errors in studies but were not plugged into the research system, meaning they were limited to critiquing after the fact rather than improving the design before money is spent & tests are ran. I decided through all of this that it was time for me to engage my main skill and start building the solution, not just for my project but for anyone who also comes across any of these issues going forward.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The most likely causes of this project failing are lack of funds to keep it up & running or lack of community on the site. The funds issue is what this effort is meant to address, even with minimal funding from this doors open that allow for much stronger fundraising efforts, I have found many grants, fellowships, or other programs that would fund something like this, but all of them need higher requirements or more social proof than I can reach right now. Both of those issues can be fixed with more funds starting momentum for this project.
The community problem can also be helped to some extent with funds, my market research so far is showing serious demand for a product like this, but the demand cuts both ways; A large part of the demand is that there is not site like this that can connect these different kinds of users in one place yet, but that also means there is not a single place I can go to post at to find these users. This isn't an insurmountable issue, content creation along with targeted outreach is a classic way to fix this (build a beacon strategy) and partnering with people skilled in marketing for a site like this can make this much more effective.

If this funding effort does not succeed, this project will continue, but it will be much harder to get further momentum with it. If CiviSci fails and nothing like it forms, it seems that science will likely continue on a downward trajectory; While there have been some efforts to fix these issues to varying levels of success, there have been very few that are designed for market competition, which shifts incentives against these issues while still being a net benefit for all stakeholders involved.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

So far CiviSci hasn't raised any funds to support the project. It is still in it's early stages, but I have identified several other funding opportunities such as particular NSF grants or other crowd funding methods but most of those funding methods require spending money first to make it achievable, that's why I am building this campaign with a relatively low minimum funding goal to help make other opportunities possible. I've set the maximum funding goal for this campaign at the point where I think it will take in order to get to the full launch where this site can become self funding through many of the traditional funding methods crowd-funding sites use.