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Nurturing Non-traditional Science

🎧 Interview with the founding editor of "Seeds of Science" in which we learn about their peer-review gardening program and what it means to create a speculative science journal. (54 mins with transcript)
Published onMar 30, 2023
Nurturing Non-traditional Science
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In this installation of Convos on the Common, our host chats with "Roger's Bacon," one of the founders of the journal: Seeds of Science. As a former biologist turned independent researcher and teacher, Roger's and his team created this new journal to address the many issues around gatekeeping and review in scientific publishing. In this conversation, he and Sarah talk about reviewing speculative research, stewarding a community, and the aesthetic value of communication.

… or listen onSpotify


Introductions

Sarah Kearns 00:31

Thank you for joining me on this podcast. I'm excited to hear and learn more about the seeds of science journal that you created.

Roger's Bacon 00:45

Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Sarah Kearns 00:47

So maybe you could just start off with the introduction to yourself and the Seeds of Science journal.

Roger's Bacon 00:54

Yeah, so my name is Roger’s Bacon. That's a pseudonym. I'm a online writer, that's the name I write under. And then also, I have founded Seeds of Science, In my day job, I'm a high school teacher, I teach biology. Before that I was a PhD student studying evolution and genetics. I dropped out a PhD with just a master's since I wasn’t ready to fully commit to pursuing the academic life. Still love science and biology and got into teaching and I wanted to keep thinking about science, and thought I had something to offer.

What led to Seeds of Science was... So we were founded in August 2021 during the pandemic, and had some more time on my hands, as many people did. I ended up just sending a cold email reaching out to Dr. Dario Kirpan, who is a professor of psychology at the London School of Economics, he had a paper that interested me and we started talking. (Credit to him for engaging with some guys just kind of random email, professors get all kinds of crazy emails sometimes.) Out of that, we found we had some similar ideas about science and, and meta science and how we can think about all of that. It led to a paper about how we can get amateurs—or really just anybody who's not in the academic system, you might call them independent researchers—more involved in psychology and the behavioral sciences. The paper was more just about how we can get those people more involved in the scientific community making unique contributions that people who are outside of the system are better position to make.

From that work, what we started talking about that when you are in the academic system, you are going to be constrained and incentivized to think and conduct scientific activities in specific ways. There's all kinds of pressures that come with academia being your career. For example, you come into graduate school, and there's a lot of pressure to publish and to show you’re a high flying productive scientist. There's gonna be a lot of pressure to do things with a quick turnaround, something that’s guaranteed a publication or will be finished in a year or two, or at least in the course of a PhD. Whereas somebody who's outside the system might have the luxury to work on something for an extended period of time and let it kind of evolve in ways that it's just going to be difficult for an academic to really do.

What else do we talk about? Basic observational research, which not going to be very sexy in many ways. Most academics want to do the research that's prestigious, impressive, that's sexy, that's big experiments with fancy equipment, huge sample sizes, and, you know, lots of grant money to fund it. In comparison just collecting basic observational research or self experiment are just not going to be incentivized to really do that.

Another area we focus on is speculation, theorizing beyond the facts beyond what is currently technologically possible. There's really no reason anyone who's familiar with the science can't provide useful speculation and that really is a core scientific activity.

There's not a lot of mechanisms or platforms in place where people can do those things and kind of receive feedback and credit for their ideas. So, in thinking about all of that practically, how can we get people outside of the system, people who have considerable scientific experience or training and generally how can we get these “outsiders” making real contributions. You hit on publishing, that's the kind of pressure point. You know, “publish or perish.” There are a million in one complaints about scientific publishing, but just the very nature of it is very exclusionary to people outside of the system. Especially coming in as a young PhD student, you don't know: how do I need to write how do I format these submissions? What journal even make sense for me to submit to? Hopefully your your PI or advisor provides this for you. But, like me, I just dropped out with a Master's. If you have ideas later in life, or you become, for whatever reason, become an expert in something, how do you really get in the conversation?

That's kind of, you know, that's a long way of kind of given the theory. So we thought, can we create a journal that really tries to platform speculative exploratory, early stage thinking, that really tries to reduce any kind of cumbersome submission requirements, or really tries to just kind of make this as simple as possible? We just ask that you send us a Word document, we'll try to work with you wherever you can whether English isn't their first language, or they're an undergraduate and their writing skills might not be perfectly polished, we want to give a platform to people like that. The name is Seeds of Science. It's a seed, it doesn't have to be fully formed.

Sarah Kearns 10:01

Yeah, I feel like a lot of that resonates very strongly with me having gone through like a biochemistry PhD program.

Speculative Science

I could definitely see—given the the mission of winning, wanting to publish, like speculative research—how that really wouldn't fit in the existing journal structure. At least not not like a scientific one, maybe like a philosophical one. But I think even that ties into what you’re saying: if you're not a philosopher, then they're not going to accept it, tying into that siloed, discipline-based publishing structure.

Roger's Bacon 10:42

Maybe a well respected tenure track professor, you can maybe get away with something that's a little more philosophical and speculative. But if you're a grad student, or you know, somebody who's not even that, I mean, good luck.

The whole kind of publishing apparatus is, for good reason justified towards, reducing false positives: we don't want to publish anything that later turns out to be not true. People probably didn't realize actually how hard that is to make rigorous science in some fields. So I think part of that reaction naturally is we're going to be extra conservative reviewers are going to take on and maybe even more critical attitude in many cases. That's all important. But there is room for something that maybe is okay with some false positives. Maybe you publish something where there's two ideas that later turned out to be not true, but you got one hidden nugget in your speculation. That’s worth knowing still.

So in that sense, we're almost like an evil twin to the typical journal, and kind of willing to platform some ideas that won't be a great fit for a lot of places.

How is it different than a pre-registered report?

Sarah Kearns 12:28

Part of what you're saying kind of reminds me of the idea of like a pre registered report, where before you start any research you basically publish your proposal. It kind of feels like an open grant kind of submission in that you're sharing what you are proposing to do what you expect your results to be, and things like that. Is that kind of what you're saying with seeds of science? It sounds less heavy on the methodology.

Roger's Bacon 13:02

We're not opposed to papers with data, especially if it's this sort of supporting the ideas, but we are much more focused on theories. This would be where you propose an experiment. This is where you could publish some observations and whatever thinking or theorizing comes from that. So in that sense, it's a very different focus.

In that paper I described before, a blind spots that amateurs could contribute is research that's much more aimless. That is allowed to kind of breathe and evolve over the course of the project. Whereas, in pre registered report, you say here's exactly what I'm going to do and I'm not going to deviate from the plan because that could decrease the rigor and add some questions to our methods. And that's, that's fine. But it's almost like if we told all painters, you have to paint from a sketch, you need to first sketch out in pencil or whatever, and then just kind of paint around there. Maybe some do that, some would prefer to just kind of start painting and see what happens and let it evolve from there. So there are different styles, and they will lead to different general outcomes or flavors of science. But you think “I can I just publish my research and propose, what would be the next step,” that's like a seed of science to us. That's what we want people to submit, we think is a kind of underappreciated and under incentivized part of science, and we want to encourage that.

Sarah Kearns 16:13

Yeah, I like truly cannot imagine how many, like future directions from people's theses are just tucked away at that last chapter that that no one will ever read. So that's really interesting.

Journal Outreach

That makes me wonder, what is the outreach that you're conducting to get more people to participate in your journal?

Roger's Bacon 16:51

If we could get more into the nuts and bolts of our criteria first: we are peer reviewed: we have all those kinds of systems in place, which I think is interesting to tease out. When I talked about Dr. Kirpan, and then the other co founder, I should mention Dr. Sergei Sampson now, he is at NYU, he's got a background in physics and AI. He helps us edit papers and recruit authors in that domain.

Graduate Student Blogs

So a lot of it is us three reaching out through our network, that was the foundation. We're on Twitter. And then I try to be active, scouting these people who grad students who have blogs where they're publishing very detailed thoughts. And they are trying to get little ways on their blogs, get these kind of these directions, things they can't follow up out there and just reaching out to them. And I'm like, “this is like great work that more people should know about? Would you like to submit this to our journal?” I'd say about half of our papers are things that in some form we just saw, already outline and recruited people to submit.

Now, we're seeing people actually writing things for us. We are very open to styles and formats and people using getting experimental or non traditional and staying away from just the introduction, methods, results, discussion format, so we really want to encourage a kind of aesthetic quality to our writing we think that's has that's really important for creativity, letting people talk in more informal tones, bringing bringing metaphor, whatever they want into it.

We find great people just around who are already doing this work. Grad students is one area definitely that we think we can offer real value to them and are trying to kind of make inroads. The whole academic system does have some reticence or does certainly not push people to think and kind of do the kind of things that you know, we hope to promote so, it's an uphill battle in some sense.

Sarah Kearns 19:57

Yeah, other than grad students who are publishing with you?

“Independent Researchers” : Giving a platform to non-traditional experts

Roger's Bacon 20:03

At least a quarter of our papers so far have been people who are retired scientists or worked in industry for a while. Some are this kind of amorphous area, you would call just independent researchers. We had one guy who was just completely self taught kind of neuroscience and psychology, and he had this whole book full of theories on language and thinking and cognition and consciousness. We worked with him to write kind of just a primer on some of his thinking and focus being grounded in literature. And I think he had some fresh thinking, and at least he was a great writer.

There are there are these these people out here and obviously, we're very inspired to when you go back in the history of science, the line between just independent researcher and professional was a little more blurred everything was a little more amateurish in some ways. Einstein was working at the patent office, there's a lot there's examples of people making real contributions, so we're we're inspired by that, for sure.

Sarah Kearns 21:46

Yeah, I feel like it reminds me of like, early enlightenment, Republic of Letters type of thing, or people who are just totally casually, doing science experiments, or just thinking about light and lenses and stuff like that.

Roger's Bacon 21:59

Darwin, of course, his seed of science was happening when he was basically a nobody on the Beagle. Those people are out there, so the question how do you how do you find them and kind of help shepherd their work? And that's the challenge.

Peer Review System

Sarah Kearns 22:18

Yeah, I guess maybe that pivot a little bit, you mentioned that your journal is peer reviewed. But you also mentioned that there's many different styles and ideas and topics that you're reviewing. So how does that review system work?

Roger's Bacon 22:37

Given everything I've said, you can imagine that just a typical review process might not be a great fit. To backtrack slightly, the one sentence criteria that we say is: we want original ideas that have the potential to advance science. That is just the bare minimum criteria. We have some more extensive criteria, you need to justify your ideas or, if you're offering some kind of speculation we always say we need some like cash value or some some take home thing. We don't want to stray too far into the philosophical realm. So we are focused on like, advancing science, but even the potential to advance science. That is an even kind of broader and more nebulous criteria.

Democratic Voting: does this potentially advance science?

The question arises then is: how do you separate bullshit crackpot speculation versus something that might not be right but it’s useful. We thought instead of fewer viewers going deep, let's try to get as many opinions as we can. Let's try to be really sort of democratic and kind of crowdsource with it. Let's put it to a vote. So we do yes/no voting based on the accumulative question of: do you think this should be given our criteria? We have democratic voting and then commenting.

We call reviewers gardeners (we really leaned into the whole botanical theme) that are tending the garden of ideas. We've had papers that got 30 votes, and maybe you know, 15 comments—some were one paragraph, and we're just like, Have you thought about this? Or I agree, and here's another way, you could extend it, or no way, and I really questioned this premise, and are people who just get fascinated by an article and send us a page or two of pretty detailed comments. There's a lot of variation, and we try to just take all of that together, the general sentiment of the comments and the voting.

If you get over 50%, that voting, that means we have to publish you or vice versa. At least at the scale we're at, we can give a little more individual attention to papers and there's nuance that just a simple vote or whatever might miss. We want to leave room open for you, a kind of some wiggle room and some variance there. But in general, if you're over 50%, yes, we publish, and we might suggest some revisions. Usually, we're pretty open with that, if there’s 80% acceptance, we're not going to make this some laborious thing where we're going to nitpick you before you publish. So we try to be a little more leave things up to author discretion with that. But we've had papers that were a 50/50 with the vote. But there was some comments, people who seemed like they had more expertise that suggested the idea was really off. And we just kind of said I, you know, you might have to revisions might be too serious for this.

We publish all comments, right after the main text of the manuscript. So even if we have a paper, that's very 50/50, you can see how the sausage is made, you can see whatever, but a wide range of people thought about it. So we in some ways, our paper is much more a snapshot of a kind of whole communities thinking about this manuscript that was proposed. In that sense, we think that's where you have sort of potential to advance science being a little more open the best, the best idea might be in the comments, in some cases.

Sarah Kearns 28:09

I definitely remember in grad school, finding a lot of value in the open peer review, and seeing what experts had critiques on in the paper. You're like, “Okay, now I know what to avoid in my own journey.” So yeah, I think that that's like a invaluable sort of thing.

Roger's Bacon 28:36

Right. And some journals do publish the comments. I'm not saying we're the only one there. I don't know of any that has our sort of community based review where you might have 20-30 plus people giving some thought to your paper.

For what it’s worth, you can do this on PubPub! Check out MIT’s “Work in Progress”for examples of on going open review.

It's certainly not perfect, there's weaknesses to this method. Being a gardener is it is open to anyone, basically, we say just ask they show us some kind of demonstrated interest or expertise in science. We're not bringing in many cases, the greatest expertise to something that's a little more technical. We try to pull in maybe one or two expert reviewers. It's not perfect for some domains that might be a little more specialized. Like we said, I think in some ways we're kind of a foil or the hidden evil twin of many things that journals do and so there's just different strengths and weaknesses.

Sarah Kearns 29:54

On the open reviews, do you show people's credit or affiliations? So when you're reading this paper about neurobiology, you can look down in the comments, and see “oh, this guy is a neurobiologist at Columbia” or whatever. So you feel like you can trust, at least that component of the article?

Roger's Bacon 30:19

So it's, that is something we actually added recently. Initially, our thought was to be sort of very anti hierarchical with it, so we just listed names. Somebody brought this up to us saying that it's nice to know if there's 10 comments, these two people are working scientists in the field. So we have provided an option on our gardener page that adds those attributions.

We send out all the articles to all the gardeners on our email listserv. If it's something in your field of expertise, you might review it, if not, don't. It's all voluntary. No one's being compelled to review articles. So in that sense, it's, you know, people volunteering, their, their effort and their time, because they kind of believe in what we're doing.

Sarah Kearns 31:31

How people can become gardeners?

Roger's Bacon 31:39

You can go on the website, we have a gardeners page, where we, I think we're up to 260, something now that are just on the mailing list, and we list your name there with your title too. There's grad students, there's professors, there's people who don't have any affiliation. It's it's pretty varied bunch. And it's just a quick form there, you know, name, email and your title, and you're good to go.

Sarah Kearns 32:10

Maybe this is a little bit in the weeds. But what is the turnaround from a submission to publication? Do they have to respond within a month type of thing to get those decisions?

Roger's Bacon 32:26

A part of just publishing being so cumbersome, and especially now as kind of wait times for getting reviews are getting longer and longer. We have a two or three week review period, where we send it out, anyone can comment, vote, and then we wrap it up and make a decision. Like I said, sometimes there's review options, sometimes not. They're usually kind of at more at the author's discretion. We've had papers where we're like, those two specific things definitely need to be addressed. And we'll kind of go through that the process and more back and forth. But yeah, we've had papers published in under a month from submission.

Sarah Kearns 33:15

That's really cool.

Building Sustainability

I guess it sounds like you're a rather small operation now. Do you see your model changing? How do you see that publishing model becoming more sustainable as you grow?

Roger's Bacon 33:33

Yeah, that's a really good question. And maybe something that people have been thinking, like, how does this all work on the back end? It is really three of us. I'm the one that is doing most of the editing and kind of communications and promotion. I'm writing and also teaching, so sometimes it's part time very much for me. So there is a sense in which if I can get by with just sort of signing the papers out collecting the reviews, formatting the papers, I can do all that myself.

We did get a small grant at one point, so we're in an awkward sort of position as a small open access journal and that we are open access. We do not charge authors. We're not charging anyone for anything. In fact, we actually pay authors. With that grant money we just decided, that what authors are doing the real work. They're providing content for us. We're helping them they're helping us. It's not a lot of money, but it's kind of just as a token, we actually pay authors now.

Just financially the whole journal was an experiment: can you create a journal that is open access, not charging anyone for everything? And can it actually kind of grow and make money? We don't have to necessarily get in that whole conversation, but we're trying to find ways to get more grants, trying to find people, just other sources of revenue, we're kind of exploring all of that now. It really comes down to I can keep running the journal as is in kind of my part time, but the growth aspects of this getting the name out recruiting more authors, that's pretty challenging, unless we actually have the money to maybe hire assistants and grow and etc.

Paying Authors and Other Experiments

Sarah Kearns 36:07

Yeah, I think there's something important to an experimental journal having those experiments that you're running yourself. That's a beautiful thing. And I guess I'm just sort of curious as to what has been a successful experiment. So far, it sounds like paying authors is probably one of them. That's unheard of in academic publishing.

Roger's Bacon 36:32

Definitely. So that's paying $25 for their article. So not a lot. But in some cases, like I said, it's the author already has written this, and we're just saying, This is great, submit it to us go through the reviews. Obviously, people appreciate it. If you some people have the grad student life, too, $25 can be nice, especially in this this economy, as they say. I think it's just people find it meaningful, we also say that people can donate will donate the money to a charity of their choosing.

We might not have the prestige of another journal. And if you have an article that, you know, could go in another more well established journal we wouldn't fall here for choosing them. If you have a paper that you think would only work for us, where we hope to provide value. But we hope the grad student out there who is a kind of growing blogger, we hope that we can promote your work. And in some way, we let authors put a biography on the kind of landing page or their article, just to give you a little more human touch too. On the page for your article, there'll be a bio will let you include a donation link is that if you appreciate this article, you can make a small donation to so-and-so charity. How often that actually happens at this point? Probably not. But you can imagine that being a pretty cool mechanism, if we really started to grow. At least there's an avenue for people to kind of show appreciation. So that's one experiment.

And other one is, we obviously published PDFs of articles and they're searchable and academic databases and all of that. But obviously, Substack is becoming a huge writing platform now. And you know, a lot of these authors that I'm recruiting they're publishing on Substack. So we figured, why not, can we publish our papers on Substack.

The way it publishing text articles on our website just felt a little clunky, and we didn't like it as much. So we kind of have this the main Seeds of Science website, and then we have a Substack publishing platform. We publish text versions of our articles. That's another mechanism that is bringing in readers since each paper gets sent out as an email newsletter to our growing list of people, they can see who wrote it with a link to your Substack. So I think that's just been cool.

We also have been publishing just a best of science blogging feed on there, which we think has been pretty cool because what we found is there's a lot of people out there writing just whether it's more kind of like science journalism, or they're writing like a little informal review of like this weird new set of experiments. Maybe it's not necessarily they're proposing new ideas. So in that sense, it's not a great fit for our kind of peer reviewed journal journal. But it’s still great science writing that will inspire people give them ideas. And so we've been publishing a lot of just just yet kind of pulling in great writers we find online and helping grow our platform helping introduce new people to their writing. We're trying to find other ways to provide value to authors that typical journals might not and so that also experimenting with garden, just the gardeners, you know, is there some way we can compensate them I mean, gardeners get if they publish a great comment you can they see it in the PDF, that's something you could reference on your resume, especially if you're an undergrad, graduate student. We hope people would find that valuable.

Sarah Kearns 41:12

Yeah, that sounds really powerful. Can folks cite it because is it because it's a PDF or do you like it deposit something as like a DOI to have it like referable?

Roger's Bacon 41:25

Yeah, so we do have to our PDFs are assigned DOIs. Yeah, that is something we have to kind of pay for and do on the back end, and something we had to kind of figure out from scratch. It costs money, all that. So yeah, that is sort of just very much like a traditional article. It'll show up in Google Scholar databases. But if you go on our website, we will have you know, text and it will say PDF, and then the Substack version, you can also see as well.

Sarah Kearns 41:56

Yeah, I feel like maybe I'm generally late to the Substack game, but it seems like a really cool decentralized social network of long form idea sharing. So that's really cool that you're using that platform for this too.

Roger's Bacon 42:12

Yeah, it because it definitely is that and it's yet because it does have sort of social network aspects, where you can recommend other writers they can recommend you, which has just definitely helped.

I think, in contrast to a typical scientific journal, when we say potential to advance science, that is we are open to any discipline. We're not a magazine or a blog, but this is a place to find new ideas and different fields, or just expose yourself to what, what are people thinking about? Now it gets, it's been interesting to see even what areas that we get papers from and it's, you know, maybe kind of what you'd expect, but we get a lot of meta science, and e get a lot of neuroscience and psychology, some biology. The mind and neuroscience is an area where it feels like we can still use a lot of exploration and speculation. People are dissatisfied with the structure of science. And you can see people are thinking about new ways to do that. And we've published some some cool kind of meta science ideas. So can we just hope it's, it's something that people just enjoy reading too.

Sarah Kearns 44:11

Yeah, that almost sounds like I guess you've been calling it like the evil twin of publishing, but like what Science magazine is, but for everybody.

Roger's Bacon 44:21

Totally. Yeah. Yeah, trying to split that gap. And, you know, to varying degrees of success at times, but it's thanks for trying something new.

Sarah Kearns 44:32

Yeah, I guess I have one last question. Have any of your biology students submitted anything to your journal? You had mentioned that you’re a high school teacher.

Roger's Bacon 44:41

Yeah. After some have graduated, I've told him about it and had them participate as gardeners was just cool. I can see the things that a comment on a biology paper. Now I've invited some of them I think a lot of my students are still in undergrad. They're early career. So I might be a long term personal goal for me. But now nothing, nothing yet.

Aesthetic Value in Writing

Sarah Kearns 45:08

Yeah, I guess other anything else I haven't asked about or any, like future goals or directions that you have with your journal?

Roger's Bacon 45:16

Yeah, that's a that's a great question. I touched on the really encouraging authors to put in aesthetic value of some kind. Feeling free to add humor or emotion, beauty, whatever or to to your article or write it in a, maybe a more indirect or informal style, you know. One example we had, I had somebody kind of frame their, their article with a little fictional narrative that talked about what it would be like if their kind of idea came to fruition of this sort of new form of therapy that they were proposing.

We think we really think that's super important to just promoting creativity in diversity of thought and science. In some ways, the emphasis on just clarity and concision and having a formal, rigorous tone in science has created just a huge uniformity in how you have to write as a scientist. Writing and thinking are just so deeply connected in so many ways that we really worry that having that uniformity of style creates a certain uniformity of thought. Go back in the history of science, it didn't always used to be this way. And I've done a little research. I mean, even in the 30s, and 40s, you see much more diverse and often sometimes poetic styles in the way scientists wrote. It was the post World War II kind of boom in funding of science specifically in the US that just very quickly changed the publishing game. Oftentimes editors in the 20s 30s, they were seeking out articles, they were going around the lab, calling out “you guys have anything to publish?” and if there wasn't enough articles, editors would write some op eds or fill it in. It wasn't like what we have today where everything is peer reviewed, and they're rejecting things left and right. Nature didn't even have peer review until the 1970s. So even peer review didn't become this ubiquitous gold standard of science until that all happened in the sort of 50s 60s and 70s.

Scientists used to write a much freer. If I had an extended metaphor to my article or a joke or like a personal narrative about how I came to do this research, something that is kind of just not people are not going to do nowadays, it's just giving reviewers one more reason not to like your paper, if the reference doesn't land or whatever. I think we under appreciate how important this is for the experience of the reader, as a scientist who asked to read paper after paper, you end up just skimming, and nothing ever grabs you. It's just like all about an efficient intake of information. In some ways that's harmful and contributes to this kind of uniformity of thought, whereas when you do have that aesthetic element, you might be reading the article and it doesn't really land with you that the metaphor or the joke, whatever. But when I read it, it inspires a different line of thinking or I get grabbed by like the little bit of emotion you put in or that joke. There's a kernel of truth to that and there's a diversifying effect on just what on readers even. So, we really I don't know how many of our papers have truly kind of taken advantage of the kind of stylistic freedom we give. But I think some of our better better papers have. And I think that's something we hope to really grow and promote as well.

Sarah Kearns 50:58

What's interesting, too, because I feel like some of the most well known physicists like Richard Feynman, or Stephen Hawking, they speak in metaphor. They're obviously very brilliant, and they have data to back their ideas up. But it's also like, ever, you've ever read QED? And it's very entertaining, even though it's very Physics-y. So that's really exciting to hear that focus on the aesthetic value of the science communication in that way. That's really cool.

Roger's Bacon 51:31

We could we could talk, we could have another podcast about just the role of metaphor, and metaphorical thinking and science. But yeah, I mean, it's when when will you know when a metaphor fails? That's where new ideas come from, or applying a new metaphor opens a new perspective on, you know, something? So? Yeah, we really want to encourage that and allow for it and all that.

Sarah Kearns 51:55

Yeah, that's great. I guess we can end this way, like you sharing how people can find science and, you know, become a gardener and be a part of your community.

Roger's Bacon 52:04

The website is the seeds of science dot org, I'm sure we'll include a link somewhere on the length of this podcast. And, you know, just check out the website, you can go to, there's a gardeners page, and you'll see information about just a registration form. Again, it's very bare bones, you're basically signing up for a mailing list. You could be on the mailing list and just kind of glance at the papers every now and then we're fine with that. You'll see the link to our Substack. If you just we talked about kind of the best of science blogging feed if you just want to kind of check out some of the interesting writing, republishing. And really, I mean, of course, it goes without saying but independent researchers, early stage researchers, that I like we talked about that direction in your thesis, you didn't get the follow up on that idea for a side project experiment. You're not sure if it makes sense, or just that crazy theory you have, you know, consider writing it up. We try to offer kind of writing support and editing as we can so just give it a shot and we're trying to find those seeds of science. So if it's you, your friend that has that idea that he’s rambled to you, just show him what we're doing.

Sarah Kearns 53:29

Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Roger’s, and yeah, definitely be following up on more of what's to come.

Roger's Bacon 53:37

Thank you so much.

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