These are three examples of the way that people might interact with the research equity system.
The researcher
Sharon, the researcher, gets into the office and checks her email. She has a comparison request from the comparative peer review system, CoPR. She visits the CoPR website and looks at the two research papers. Yesterday, she read both papers and made a few comments that may be helpful to future reviewers. She checks over her comments and then uses the CoPR interface to select the paper that she believes has more value. The CoPR scores of the two papers are automatically updated to reflect her choice.
Sharon then checks how her own work is performing on the CoPR site. Some of her papers seem to be staying at about the same CoPR rating. She hopes that one of those papers will begin to rise again when new results come out substantiating its hypothesis. Example Philanthropy has offered to purchase shares of one of her older papers at a reasonable price, and she sells 10% of the shares that she owns in that paper.
After checking her latest manuscript for a final time, Sharon submits the paper to the CoPR system, specifying an allocation of shares to the paper’s coauthors and investors per their existing agreement. After submission, the CoPR system emails the coauthors and investors to verify that the information and share allocation is correct. Later that day, the paper is live and begins to receive reviews from peers.
The buyer
Miguel is an analyst at Example Philanthropy, which funds basic research. He finishes lunch and logs into the CoPR site. Example Philanthropy has offered to purchase shares in several research papers that the philanthropy is interested in supporting. Miguel notes that several researchers and investors have sold their shares to Example Philanthropy since earlier today.
Miguel checks Example Philanthropy’s outstanding purchase offers. He notices two research papers whose authors and investors have sold no shares at the offered share price for 5 months now. Since the original offer, the CoPR ratings for both of those papers have increased considerably. He makes a note to have his team reassess the research to inform a new offer price.
Example Philanthropy supports a specific cause, and that cause is most often served by a few particular research topics. In those topics, Miguel sees that there are papers that now have CoPR scores that put them in the range that his philanthropy finds interesting. He adds those papers to his reading list. If the papers fit the philanthropy’s criteria, then he will recommend making an offer to purchase the shares.
The investor
Jasmine is the head of a research department at a university. There are promising new research ideas that have been proposed within her department, and Jasmine considers how those ideas might be funded. She looks at the CoPR site and checks the offer prices for the research papers in which her department owns shares. She believes that some of the more mature research papers may have already reached a share price that is sufficiently high. She chooses a few of those papers and sells the shares. As the cash accumulates in the department account, it reaches a level that would cover the cost of the newly proposed projects.
Jasmine then looks at other research that is also owned by her department. She believes that some of those papers are of greater value than the research community currently appreciates. She schedules a meeting with Sharon to discuss work that might produce valuable new results as well as more fully demonstrate the value of research papers that they already own.
Research Equity 