One of the hardest things to do in science is put a value on information. So what prevents us from doing the same thing with science as we do with our latte’s every day: Coming in and saying, “This piece of data is worth X dollars.” The problems stem from inefficiencies of how we communicate and distribute scientific progress.

If we were to look at academic science as a marketplace, what would we learn? Lets start with defining the players. The main products are the papers and the data. The producers are the authors and the consumers are the readers. What does this marketplace lack? Incredibly, this marketplace lacks the most basic part needed to evaluate products: the currency!

Without appropriate currency, we can not know the value of papers and scientific results. Sure, there are obviously important discoveries (like the structure of the DNA) or the seminal paper describing the semi-conservative replication of DNA by Meselson and Stahl. But, how do we know that a discovery is important? How do we know the “value” of a paper?

There are two answers that I hear most often to the above questions. First, my colleagues tell me, “I know people in my field so I know who to believe.” However, as science becomes bigger and people publish more often and move around between fields with increasing frequency, this method of “guild-membership” stops working.

The other traditional answer to this has to do with citation index: a measure of how many other authors deemed your work worthy enough to cite in their own papers. The problem here is that the turnaround time is measured in years. Someone has to read your work, do a followup experiment and then go through the process of publishing. Imagine if I created a car, sold it to you, but only got payment three years later.

Both these methods of evaluating scientific work create huge inefficiencies in academic science. These inefficiencies all stem from legacy issues in scientific publishing, which was established in the 17th century. We can do better. Economic theory states that income is measured in absolute monetary supply multiplied by the speed at which money moves through the system. One way to increase the utility of knowledge is to increase the speed at which that knowledge is evaluated by the community.