3 comments

• @georgedonnelly 25 November 2020

  Welcome! - Don't put a cookie notice over top your content please. - Text is small and grey, low contrast, almost impossible to read. - Suggest you make a slide deck and give a presentation on video. - I question the utility of publishing a journal as a first step. High cost and what is the impact in the real world? What is the business model going forward? How sustainable is it? I question how publishing a medical journal is a logical next step for the BCH community. How does it serve our goals? - You discuss integration of BCH but I'm not sure into what or for what purpose precisely? - No active clinical projects engenders skepticism. Venezuela is desperate for medical care and is a prime target for BCH adoption. Is there any nexus there? Venezuelans also have to import a lot of medication, which is a great place to connect cross-border currency (BCH strong point) with medicine and in a geographic location that is fertile for BCH adoption. What other crypto projects and communities are you approaching to fund you? Thanks for sharing this. Best wishes.

  • @onedotsurgery 25 November 2020

    Thank you so much for the comprehensive reply. We have disabled the cookie notice (our apologies), and in relation to the current design of the page, it is based on the format of the markdown text that is only available for a flipstarter campaign. However, if we do launch the flipstarter (albeit limited with markdown text), I agree, we do need a more presentable information page of the campaign on our website to support the flipstarter app. To answer the project queries: "The high cost / sustainability of a journal" We do not believe publishing an electronic journal need be high cost. Indeed, this is what we are campaigning against - the seemingly extortionate charges levied by publishers onto the users (in one way or another), citing high running costs. One.Surgery has a project history of producing high quality, low cost solutions that are easy to maintain. The business model going forward is to produce a series of low cost, high quality journals that are affordable and replicatable - and supported by payments made through a borderless cryptocurrency with minimal transaction costs (ideally BCH) gateway. Currently, it can cost over $3000 for an author to publish a peer reviewed article, or a subscriber $40 to access it. If the cost to produce one article can be reduced to well below $100 or even $10, author payments or subscriber payments will be 1-2% of the current costs - and instantly affordable to anyone - especially if the journal worked with a cryptocurrency payment, rather than fiat, driving running costs down further. We are confident we can produce such a product and obtain the backing of our community to sustain it. "The real world impact" The scientific publishing industry is a multibillion dollar industry, and the global industry is controlled by a handful of large publishers, with huge profits (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science). This has a vast impact on the propogation and dissemination of medical research, especially those working in resource poor settings. Medical research saves lives (as we have seen with how the international medical community has come together to produce Covid vaccines in record time). The dissemination of medical knowledge in an affordable, accessible way is critical to the development of treatments and health service improvements for people across the world. We believe it is as important as it can be in the real world. "How does it serve our goals?" BCH is an industry changing technology - and the global surgery and medical community has an industry that needs changing. BCH, along with numerous other instant payment protocols, are seeking to engage new audiences to uptake their technology. The global surgery movement is a diverse, international movement, with a motivated, open-minded, educated and passionate community. If BCH is looking to find users and engage with a likeminded, philosophically aligned global movements then a symbiotic relationship maybe what we are all looking for. "BCH integration" We aim to reduce article processing costs to a handful of dollars. We have an international target audience - mostly based in low and middle income countries. We want everyone to access peer reviewed, high quality science, for an affordable transaction - and we need a low cost, instant, borderless payment system. For example, we want a user in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Nepal to tap a button, pay a dollar, and access research that would have not been available. Or scientists in Nigeria or Haiti to pay $50 (rather than $4000), to have their work published. We need to drive down our costs - BCH helps enormously with this... and in turn, BCH has found new users in Ethiopia, Cambodia, Nepal, Haiti... "No active clinical projects engenders skepticism" The One.Surgery team has huge clinical experience across the world. (https://one.surgery/about-1-surgery/). I, myself have worked as a surgeon in 5 continents and continue to work in low resource settings. Therefore, we have real world clinical experience and understand the needs of the clinical community like no other. Clinical projects, although may seem the most attractive option to fundraise, are also fraught with risks - especially when it comes to maintaining the highest possible ethical standards of care. The global health movement is changing, where we recognise the importance of sustainable education, research, advocacy and collaboration rather than the more traditional approach of non-sustainable clinical projects. There are certainly roles and projects for all, but I would suggest clinical projects should be met with the highest degrees of skepticism and we would only engage in such projects if the highest standards were met. There are countless clinical projects, historical and to this day, that perhaps dont meet ethical standards of modern medicine. "In relation to Venezuala" Without doubt, cross border payments will benefit the medical manufacturing industry, as with all industries in times of economic uncertainty for a country - especially in importing and exporting of goods. This is a different problem to the one being addressed here by this flipstarter. The long suffering users of the publishing industry are also fertile for a new way of working, with no geographical limitation and therefore we include Venezuala. Indeed, being a borderless problem, a borderless tech such as BCH maybe better suited to this fertile ground. "Funding from other crypto projects and communities" The BCH community is our first approach - til now, we have been entirely self sustained on a minimal budget and produced excellent projects(and proved sustainability over 3 years). Our industry lends itself to multiple potential partners within the medical and surgical industry, and indeed there are other funding sources that we could seek funding from. However, we are approaching the BCH community first, above all else, as we feel within our own industry, and within the cryptocurrency industry, the BCH community values and philosophy correlate closest to us. We have been engaged and watching the crypto sphere for a long time, and now feel the right time to seek funding and longer term collaboration. We hope to develop industry partners within the medical field as we grow but hope for a productive partnership with BCH to help the projects expand initially. We believe BCH is the best early entrance partnership that can help us develop together. Thank you so much for the comment and very happy to engage further! Saqib

  • @onedotsurgery 25 November 2020

    Here are some responses to further questions received: "How to incentivize peer review?" A vast majority of peer review completed within the surgical and medical industry is performed by motivated, experienced scholars for free. This is mostly due to the scientific culture we are all raised in as healthcare professionals, understanding the importance of our work and will often give our time freely. This free work, however, is usually translated into large profits for the industry. We would hope to continue to utilise the goodwill of the medical culture to ensure high quality peer review is donated to us by those scholars supporting our movement. However, going forward, we do see a model where peer review is nominally compensated. If the model of publishing becomes non-profit, and overheads are vastly reduced, one option is to compensate the peer review process with BCH (whether an article is accepted or not) - essentially moving the income from the publishers profits to the scientists. "How to compete with other open access journals such as Plus One?" The vast majority of open access journals charge an author processing fee - PlusOne for example charging in excess of over $1500 to the authors. (https://plos.org/publish/fees/). This cost is unaffordable to most of the world's researchers in low and middle income countries. We would aim to minimise this completey, and with our first journal, make this entirely free - for both authors and readers. This, we hope would attract science from low and middle income countries to submit to our model. Furthermore, we are developing an expanding a distribution service, to ensure research, once published, is pushed to the readers that need it most. We have developed our research index which we hope would attract authors to submit to us. During this phase 1 process, we will be heavily reducing our publishing costs and use this low cost open access model to truly calculate how low our running costs can be. Thereafter, for future journals copying the model, once we can demonstrate extremely low running costs, we can consider much more affordable author / reader costs to maintain sustainability, driving down the entire industry as we go.