Team Driven

Research at 39Alpha is conducted by teams of five (four Ph.D’s and one part-time freshman undergraduate student), and is published as such. There are no individual authors. The reputation of the team (and its members) are one. We believe that the modern publication paradigm centered on individual authorship actively incentivizes behavior that, while necessarily beneficial to individual careers, hampers scientific progress. Modern researchers compete with one another in ways that dissuade unfettered collaboration, information sharing, trust, and efficient divisions of labor. By shifting the publication unit away form individuals and onto small teams, 39Alpha will foster intra-team environments which incentivize these integral concepts.

Independent Finance

Teams and team members neither solicit nor compete for their own individual grant money. Stability of funding is provided from the top down, with fundraising being carried out by dedicated professionals employed by 39Alpha for this express purpose. This differs from the modern research paradigm which requires individual researchers to spend their entire careers effectively operating as personal contractors, working relatively short, necessarily overlapping contracts to which their “employers” (universities, public/private research outfits) generally take more than 50% the value of. Researchers working for 39Alpha are employees of 39Alpha, with salary and benefits in the same manner as any private sector business. Their job is to conduct original research, not raise money.

Open Source Tools

39Alpha teams will publish their tools open-source, together with their results. Much of modern research science relies on large quantities of data generated, processed, handled, and interpreted by custom software built by researchers. While it is standard practice for the eventual research publications to go through a review process, it is far from standard to release the source code of the software which generated the results to either the reviewers nor the scientific community at large. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to confirm or reproduce the results of others. Reproducibility is central and essential to the establishment of scientific discovery within the larger scientific discourse. Beyond publishing in open-source peer reviewed journals, the teams at 39Alpha will produce interactive versions of their publications on the 39Alpha site. These versions will be interactive insofar as all figures and calculations will link to the original code which generated them. In this way, all tools will be published alongside results, allowing others to test the exact code used in a given study, potentially improve upon its form and function, and employ and evolve the results themselves. This shift in practices is fundamental to the future health of nearly all science steeped in analytical techniques, large data sets, and complex systems analysis.

Publish Failure

39Alpha teams will digitally publish approaches and efforts that failed to solve a given problem. Modern science does not overtly publish failing efforts, as individual reputations and careers are done no favors by doing so. Approaches which do not work are instead passed down culturally through the experience of individual researchers who collaborate with one another. However these lessons and the insights gained from failure are not published to the wider community. This sets the stage for an odd reality. A researcher failing to find evidence of a novel idea within the literature has either wandered into a brilliant realization, untested and unexplored, or has stumbled upon an inevitable failure, encountered many times before by many others, to which there is no warning! As modern publishing practices do not publish failures, researchers are doomed to repeat the same mistakes as those who came before them, wasting time, effort, and resources. At 39Alpha, team projects which are unsuccessful in either confirming or rejecting their original hypothesis due to shortcomings in method, initial assumptions, false pretenses, etc., will nonetheless publish these failures in the same digital interactive style as their successes. Though not published in peer-reviewed journals like their successful counterparts, they will nonetheless be identified as failures and made available to the larger scientific community, code and all.

Serial Singular Focus

Teams will engage in only one research project at a time. A facet of modern research that detracts heavily from productivity is the sheer number of projects and responsibilities present at any given time for any given researcher. Focus is heavily divided, and progress on any one goal must come at the expense of many others. Moreover, this division of focus and metal effort is different for every member of a group attempting to solve a collective problem, as each is engaged in their own individual endeavors, subject to the demands of their own individual grants, and involved in a unique array of other collaborations. Teams at 39Alpha will engage in one major project at a time, collectively decided upon by team members for an amount of time determined by the projects scope.

Method Evolution

39Alpha teams operate at levels 3 and 4 simultaneous, continuously evaluating how their science is being done. The operational method followed by 39Alpha research teams is designed and monitored by social and organization psychologists, keen on using 39Alpha teams as a test bed for original publications and advancement in this field. These physiologists monitor how teams communicate and collaborate amongst themselves, how they collectively move on scientific goals and targets, and how the disciplinary backgrounds and personalities of individual team members affects creativity, productivity, and original discovery.