Dear sensemakers,
The last few months sure went by in a blur. In March, we officially wrapped up the Astera Open Science fellowship. The ending of a good period is always bittersweet, but at least now we have time to unpack and share some learnings and updates. This post will provide a broad outline, and in future posts we will go more in depth on some of the topics raised here.
SenseNets → Cosmik
First, we changed our name to Cosmik! We realized SenseNets happens to be the name of a Chinese company developing facial surveillance technology, so we decided to rebrand. Cosmik stands for Collective Sensemaking Networks, and also reflects our ecological stance towards science and intelligence more broadly. Kosmos is "world" or "universe" in Greek. Intelligence is not just in our heads, but also deeply rooted in our interactions with the physical and social worlds around us. Our thinking mediums are the message. Environments can degrade cognition or they can make us smarter, and we’re on a mission to design and create environments that augment human capacities for collective sensemaking. Our new home on the web is cosmik.network, and you can also find us on Bluesky, Mastodon and Twitter. Check out our new 2 minute intro video presenting Cosmik!
v0.2 launch: Hyperfeed
At the end of 2024 we launched a new alpha version of the Cosmik app, v0.2, to a few dozen researchers. v0.2 featured the Hyperfeed, a new kind of AI-enhanced, cross-platform research feed. The previous version of the app, v0.1, was geared towards helping researchers convert their social media posts into nanopublications. However, as described in the last blog post, through user testing we learned that more work is needed to establish tooling and incentives for nanopublishing.
With the Hyperfeed, we pivoted from publishing to focus more on the information discovery experience. Browsing a feed requires less effort from researchers and provides more immediate value. Underneath the hood we continued to use our LLM pipeline to convert posts to the the structured knowledge graph nanopublication format, and it was exciting to experiment with user experiences leveraging these semantically enriched posts.
There is still work to improve the UX, and we are missing some key features which will be necessary for an open beta for Cosmik, in particular feed personalization based on a user’s social graph.
That said, we see great potential in feeds powered by rich knowledge graphs. One particularly cool knowledge-graph enabled feature is a “semantic layer” over references: for any reference shared to the network, the Hyperfeed aggregates all of the posts mentioning that reference, along with their semantics (which posts agree with the reference, which disagree with it, and so on). In this way, users get a sense of the general sentiment around a reference at a glance, and they can also easily navigate the diverse perspectives relating to it. The figure below shows the how Cosmik’s semantic layer (right) provides additional context missing in traditional social media feeds (left).
Open science sustainability
We have also been busy thinking about sustainability models for Cosmik. Creating a successful startup is already hard enough, and we learned that creating an impactful open science venture poses unique challenges on top of that. Open science is a public good. Correspondingly, infrastructure supporting open science should uphold additional standards around governance and sustainability, as well as insurance against data loss or enclosure (the POSI Principles). Some of these standards, like open data or open source code, can be at odds with the business incentives of startups who must survive in highly competitive environments. Venture-backed startups also face particularly challenging decisions about exit strategies, as the conventional path of acquisition by publishers may satisfy investors, but frequently undermines open science principles.
The non-profit route is not a panacea, either. Non-profits generally depend on philanthropic donations which require extensive application processes, and rarely provide the stable, long-term financial support necessary for sustained operations. Recent political shifts in the United States demonstrate the vulnerability of even government-funded scientific infrastructure.
For Cosmik, we identified a novel organizational and sustainability model in the form of researcher-governed data co-operatives. This model is inspired by Subvert, a similar effort in the music industry, and also the insight that the type of data shared by scientists on social media can be extremely valuable when aggregated and integrated with analytics services, both to other researchers as well as to institutions.
Co-operatives, while not common (yet!) in the landscape of open science ventures, elegantly address many key challenges by combining the sustainability features of for-profit entities while maintaining stakeholder alignment:
Researchers have a stake in the value they generate, incentivizing their participation
Community governance and ownership solves the exit problem and provides resilience against predatory acquisition
For Cosmik, we are pursuing a strategy of philanthropic and other POSI-aligned funding, with a long term goal of creating a self-sustaining eco-system with revenue from membership fees, data-sharing agreements, and value-added services such as advanced AI features.
More on the data co-op model in future posts!
A Cosmik moment for researcher-governed science social media
A lot has happened in the fellowship year, including our own learnings as well as external world events. Taken together, we are at a unique moment now where a lot of stars are aligning for our vision of Cosmik and the idea of a new kind of social network for researchers.
Researchers want better social curation & discovery tools
Posts about “goodreads for science” have a curious tendency to go viral. Clearly, it’s on a lot of people’s minds. Check out this post from just a few months ago, which triggered huge discussions:
28.9K
We also heard similar sentiments firsthand in dozens of interviews with researchers: for many, social media is the place to stay abreast of new trends in their field, but they also expressed frustration with noisy feeds and fragmented discussions.
Researchers want to publish insights, not just papers
We recently came across a Nature paper citing Twitter posts, which encapsulates both the brilliance and the brokenness of science social media. On one hand, insights shared on social media are found to be worthy of citation in a Nature paper, no less! But at the same time, we can and should do a lot better than closed platforms like Twitter in terms of a publication format for small units of scientific knowledge (Nanopublications, anyone?).
More broadly, during the fellowship we learned that many researchers, especially those outside of traditional academia, want to participate in science, but they don’t have the time or incentives to write full papers. These researchers have valuable insights to share, but they lack the right medium for their contributions. As a result, we are losing vast amounts of potential insights to “creative exhaust”.
Researchers increasingly care about infrastructure, governance and data rights
The extractive nature of the academic publishing ecosystem is not news for most researchers, who have nonetheless accepted these conditions as an unavoidable cost for doing science.
Efforts to try and change the “rules of the game” happened mostly on the margins. However, recent developments - such as the decimation of Science Twitter following Musk’s takeover, publishers brazenly selling researchers’ labor as training data to GenAI companies, and the Trump administration's cuts to federal science funding - are jarring the status quo. The silver lining to all this chaos is that it is creating space for new approaches to be tried, and it is also catalyzing discussions around how to develop sustainable, resilient, and community-governed research infrastructure.
Massive growth in open science social media (Bluesky)
One very real change in the status quo is the exodus of scientists from Twitter to Bluesky. Altmetric has reported that on some days the volume of research mentions on Bluesky now equals that of Twitter, despite Bluesky being at least 10x smaller. The formation of Science Bluesky presents a unique opportunity: due to its extensible and decentralized nature, Bluesky and its underlying ATProto provide fertile soil for an ecosystem of transformative new open science tools. For example, we are already seeing ATProto Goodreads apps cropping up, and an ATProto Science Goodreads is a natural evolution of this trend!
End of a chapter, start of a journey
The fellowship has ended, but in many ways the journey is just beginning.
We’re continuing work towards an open beta for Cosmik: we’re developing a deeper integration with Bluesky and ATProto, and we’re also exploring ways to improve the discovery experience with social graph based personalization and semantic search.
On the organizational side we are continuing to develop the researcher co-op and are aiming to open Cosmik for membership when we finish incorporation.
To support these next steps, we are actively fundraising from philanthropies and POSI-aligned investors.
The Astera program was an amazing opportunity to take on big questions at the bleeding edge of science, how we publish it, how we communicate it and how we make sense of it. As far as I know, there is no other program like it in terms of the generous support and amount of independence provided.
I also recognize that big aspirations come with the risk of falling flat. At times I feel a sense of vulnerability that the tangible outcomes of the fellowship may seem modest - we haven’t even launched an open beta yet. And yet, we're playing the long game. While we recognize the crucial role of better technology, we also know that tech alone won’t save us. We believe that truly transforming how we do research will go beyond specific apps and tools, and that our efforts must tap into researchers' deeper aspirations for a more equitable, participatory and empowering knowledge ecosystem. Building this kind of researcher-governed infrastructure requires patience and persistence - it means questioning established systems and working with change leaders to propose and implement bold alternatives. The path is challenging, but the potential to transform how science functions makes the journey worthwhile.
Big thanks to the Cosmik team: Pepo, Shahar, Wes, Andrea and Colin. And special thanks to Astera and the Open Science team for making all this possible, in particular Jessica Polka, our program director, and Prachee Avasthi, head of Open Science.
