Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
The biggest problem scientists in academia face is that they can’t do actual research. They spend most of their time doing stuff that doesn’t matter. So probably the biggest leverage you have is to reduce the time they spend doing stuff that doesn’t matter.<p>The most effective way to do that is to establish an alternative form of institution that focuses only on research (and teaching if you like - teaching is not the problem). A tough challenge. One line of attack would be to contrast your costs with academia’s full economic coating model.<p>Failing that, here’s some things you can do:<p>- develop a paper reference system that actually works well. Mendeley is the best there is and it’s (IMO) rubbish. Poorly designed.<p>- build a typesetting system that’s an alternative to latex but is WYSIWYG. Particularly important outside of CS.<p>- build a free conference organising &#x2F; review tool that works. EasyChair is popular and utter garbage.<p>- build tools to automate the grant writing process. A step by step system to create a grant proposal, tailored to each grant scheme. Yes, this would potentially damage the grant application process. But it doesn’t make any sense anyway, so at least this would free up a few years where academics could churn the required proposals out fast until you were somehow disallowed.<p>- provide free slide materials, examples, exercises for all the main CS etc topics. Some kind of “piece it together” kit so lecturers could save time making slides and other materials that tick boxes. Diagrams, for instance, would be very useful. Pseudocode too.<p>NB you probably won’t make any money.