Understanding what happens with ideas once shared

[npscience]

Hello,

On behalf of eLife, we found JBI interesting and have some questions regarding what happens with ideas once shared:

1. Who has voted for the ideas?
   We were wondering if it is possible to expose the identities of who has upvoted an idea, given we are logged in via ORCiD. In this way, someone could better understand whether there would be potential collaborators or supporters should they wish to pursue an idea, and the reputation base might be a useful way to encourage people to pursue an idea (and find funding?).

There was an interesting project at the eLife Innovation Sprint earlier this year that prototyped an interaction between a DOI object and an ORCID iD user with an attribute ('clear', 'robust', 'interesting' for publications; but here could the attributes could be different): see Plaudit described in this blogpost; contact Vincent @Vinnl.

2. Who is working on the idea?
   If someone has adopted the idea and is working on it, how can they say this directly on the idea at JBI? Is a comment deemed sufficient? Would it be useful to have a mechanism to distinguish between untested ideas and those that are being worked on or have evidence behind them, and for people to identify themselves as the people working on the idea.
   Is it sufficient for a researcher to cite the idea in their subsequent publication? If that has happened, can these citations be exposed at the level of the idea in JBI so that perusers can follow the trail?

Many thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Best,
Naomi
Innovation Officer, eLife
innovation at elifesciences dot org

[physicsdavid]

Hi Naomi,

Thanks for the comments and questions.

I think the idea of exposing the identities of upvoters is interesting but we need to think a bit more about it, specifically in terms of what are the real benefits weighed against the general privacy issues of exposure.

Somebody who wishes to make a public comment or seek collaboration is currently able to do so with the comments functionality and that would avoid an idea contributor potentially spamming people for simply being upvoters but not necessarily appropriate for collaboration. So I'm not sure how much the idea contributor would gain and whether it is worth it relative to the potential cost to upvoters. We'll give it some more thought though.

Thanks for the pointer to Plaudit. I want to think about the implications of it a bit more as the actual consequences of building that infrastructure aren't entirely clear to me yet.

We have some mechanisms in place for seeing who might be pursuing an idea but certainly could do more. If an idea is cited by another within the Journal of Brief Ideas, that is indicated on the idea. See this example: The NASA K2 Mission has yet to observe an analog of Tabby's Star

We are also aware of citations to JOBI papers from mainstream journals (such as from ApJ) but we haven't integrated with CrossRef to help find them, partly because this project is entirely self-funded and is developed entirely in spare time. Being able to find those citations would be great, of course.

It would be good to have a way for people to signal that they are working further on an idea but it's hard to figure out how to define "working on an idea". One way we hoped that people might use is to just add their further development as new JOBI papers. We haven't seen a lot of that done yet but also haven't promoted that use case particularly strongly.

The ideas you propose are certainly interesting to us and we have considered them some amount but given that we are time- and funds-limited, we simply haven't had the opportunity to pursue them as far as we would like.

Thanks again,
David