About You-Science

Education & Training

You-Science sets off as an education and training tool for young scholars (Honours level onward). It provides a word-editing tool to guide students in writing assignments, essays, proposals and dissertations.

Its primary goal, at the outset, is to become the preferred go-to platform for young scholars (especially in Africa, where most students lack training opportunities in academic writing) in their formative postgraduate years.

It will then seamlessly evolve into a multilevel and multidisciplinary publication and interaction platform. It is thus to be expected that, after starting with young academics, the participation in You-Science will expand into conventional academic circles the world over.

Interaction and Followership

Through You-Science, all participants will be able to publish widely, review and rate other participants’ work and build their own followership (e.g. their own networks and research ‘tribe’). They will also be able to fundraise, push new ideas into the scientific community and interact with news outlets and public opinion.

To register as a user, you need to have an academic email account. All papers and publications will in any case we publicly viewable to any person, even if not registered (and the viewership ratings will also be considered in the overall rating of any author).

Registering, Preparing and Uploading an article

The first objective of You-Science is to become the world’s leading platform for education and training in academic publishing. You-Science involves students the world over (starting from Africa) and by providing software-based tools to guide the process.

You-Science provides registered users with easy steps to complete the publication process. The key features will be: easy structure, simple sentences, spell and grammar checks, standardized bibliography, clear tags and keywords to identify and catalogue the publication, and rigid word counts for each section.

Once uploaded, the paper is not yet published until it receives at least 5 positive peer reviews (if a 5-star scale is used, then a positive review must be above 3). In order to do that, the author can send out the draft to as many (registered or potential) users as needed. The more the better. Through a Send for Review option, the author can pick other users already on the platform of invite more academics to conduct a review by joining the platform. The more quickly the paper is reviewed, the more quickly it is published.

Automatic and bottom-up peer reviewing

Upon registration, a user will need to perform a number of reviews (at least 10) before he or she can upload and publish an article. This is an important detail: we want users to have an incentive to review as widely and as thoroughly as possible, as a good P2P review mechanism is essential for the platform to succeed (we must avoid ‘freeriding’).

Every 10 reviews completed, the user acquires a publication token. If not through reviews, a publication token can also be accrued by purchasing it for a fixed price.

Ratings

The overall rating of each user is the result of his/her rating for each authored publication, ratings for all authored reviews, number of article views (including non-user viewers) plus H Index on Google Scholar, overall mentions on the Google Search Engine and, potentially, the number of books written in the case of non-bibliometric disciplines.

All this information, including a link to all papers published, personal websites, social media handles and the like, will be featured on the user’s Profile Page. We want all users to promote the profile pages and their own publications.

Higher ratings will mean better visibility on You-Science (most reviewed or higher-rated papers will get special features, as well as publications by better-rated authors and the like).