The idea of ​​a large information system for the Russian Academy of Sciences

As a fan of all knowledge cataloging, I have long been keeping in my head the idea of ​​an information system for the RAS. But right now it is time to put it in the form of text. Mature in connection with the latest events and with the attempt of this very RAS to be rigidly reformed from above.

So, the Russian Academy of Sciences is very lacking in openness. Namely, what is happening there is poorly understood. Even the official site ras.ru carries little useful information, and it’s extremely difficult to find there. Trying to cover promising research is interesting and accessible to the average people in general, no one tried (by analogy with the same NASA). Each department and institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences has its own website, of varying degrees of wretchedness. Press center if there is, it works badly. Nothing significant from the RAS does not appear in the media, usually reprints from the English-language press. Yes, and our successful scientists almost all polls write and publish abroad. Moreover, the Russian Academy of Sciences encourages this, since the latest reports that I have prepared in my department, for example, include the foreign Web of Science and publications in cited foreign journals, and the significance of publications in Russian journals is melting away. In this regard, when the buch rose to the majority of people in the country, in general, it did not care. Few people know what kind of a RAS is and what it generally does.



So where to start. Academy should make an information system with the following functionality:

• You can register in the system only for RAS employees or for an invite from an RAS employee. All registered under their personal data. Making clones should be a very complex process.
• You can put your publication or article in the system in pure HTML, PDF or DOCX (you can give a bonus for HTML). Accepted articles, for example, after publication in another journal. Annotations should be in Russian and English in the form of text for good indexing by search engines. To give articles the opportunity to add pictures and video with experiments (at least from Youtube).
• Accepted articles on any subject, which deals with the RAS. There is a powerful cataloger in all areas of the RAS. Large directions can be brought to the subdomains.
• It is possible to change the added article, version control is in effect You can delete your article from the system entirely.
• Each user has an open system of karma, as in habra or stackoverflow. It is considered on the basis of the number, rating of articles, the number of positively evaluated comments and the quotation of the author in the articles of other authors in the system.
• Each article has comments and rating, there is a button "doubt in the scientific", you can click it only with good karma.
• A team of moderators and experts operates from the Russian Academy of Sciences, moderating comments and checking the most resonant articles for validity. The verified articles receive the status of full-fledged publication and can be used in the defense of master's and doctoral theses.
• The press center monitors the most interesting publications and rewrites them in an accessible form for publication on a separate information site “for the media and the curious.”
• To create motivation for content: the availability of publications in this system is added to the summary reports on the work of branches and institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In this case, employees and department heads will be interested in publications being included in this system.
• Work on a good visibility of the site for search engines. Make a competent structure. Give a sitemap. Agree with specialized systems for indexing publications like scholar.google.com and elibrary.ru

In general, it will be a kind of analogue of the English-speaking arxiv.org, but with official support from above and in Russian.
pros

• The opportunity to find rare articles that are published in print magazines and nowhere else, or which under normal conditions had only the English version.
• Under the interesting articles, experts of related topics will join the discussions. It will be possible to directly ask questions to the author. Interest groups will be formed.
• Articles will be opened and partially verified for scientific and novelty.
• It will be immediately seen which of the articles are really breakthrough and cause great interest.
• The activity of the RAS will be visible to any ordinary Internet user.

Cons :

• An opportunity to spoil your karma a lot by writing or publishing something badly tested (however, this can be solved by the ability to reset karma once a year, for example).
• With insufficient moderation and / or with a strong influence of the resource on the reports of the institutes and / or with a poorly thought out rating system, cheating in votes and comments is possible.

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From my point of view, the pros are many times greater than the minuses. It would seem that this system is not so complicated and a small team of programmers would have done it in a few months. However, it is not so simple that for the system to work, two conditions are required:

1. The system should be well thought out, have an intuitive interface, should be comfortable and pleasing to the eye. In general, it can not be done on the knee by a couple of students. You need to call on the beta test well-known scientists with their publications and thoroughly test the functionality on them.
2. This system should be spelled out in detail in the plan for reforming the RAS. The system should have a powerful top PR at the time of discovery, both within the RAS and in the media, including on television. Like, for example, “Gosulergos” or “Public Initiatives” roi.ru.

In the absence of these conditions, the system simply does not shoot and it will turn out another stillborn project.

That's all I wanted to say. Your constructive criticism and additions are waiting in the comments. And sorry for the confusion.