Future of Scientific Publishing: Interview with Mathïs Fédérico

The scientific publishing system is broken. It’s hard to deny it: The publish-or-perish culture, for-profit publishing with high profit margins, reproducibility crisis… Researchers suffer, maybe complain – but usually can’t imagine an alternative. And yet alternatives are emerging, in clever minds and their initiatives. One of them is Mathïs Fédérico and his company Bycelium.

In this interview Mathïs talks about the problems with the current academic publishing in STEM and his approach to bring about a systemic change. Watch the interview or read the transcript below and get a portion of hope for the future of academia.

Transcript

Martina: Welcome everyone. Here is Martina from writingscientist.com. I am excited to talk today to Mathïs from Bycelium. I met Mathïs on LinkedIn. I was commenting on a post about the scientific publishing system being terrible and about ideas that we do not need journals nowadays. With the digital tools and the world we have now, we are stuck in a very old-fashioned system. When I make such comments, I get a lot of pushback: That we need journals to stay away from bad science. People are stuck in old thinking. Mathïs commented in agreement, and I became curious about who he is and what he is working on. 

I did not read up too much on Bycelium to make this an authentic interview. Academia nowadays is not so cool, and there are people and organizations with ideas on how to get out of this. Mathïs, would you like to say a few words about yourself?

Mathïs: Nice to meet you everyone. I am Mathïs, a French engineer. I have been disappointed by the current scientific system many times, from within academia and also from industry as quantitative behaviors of academia have crept into industry. The broken way we evaluate scientific prestige is everywhere. This led me away from academia into startups, mostly in AI. After working in entrepreneurship, I decided that my best contribution to science was not a single scientific contribution but changing the scientific system altogether, which is why Bycelium exists.

The mission of Bycelium is to realign scientific incentives with scientific progress. That is a short introduction of what we will talk about.

Martina: Is Bycelium your project?

The idea of Bycelium: rewarding people for bringing evidence that will change others’ minds.

Mathïs: Yes, I founded Bycelium as a startup. It was my first project after school. I paused it for two years and went to industry to try research and development, then to AI startups. Startups are great for cutting-edge innovation but not for deep thinking and curiosity, which science needs. In startups you have to be efficient, not curious. I wanted to see how we can give back the scientific freedom, be curious and surprised by our own findings.
That is the idea of Bycelium: rewarding people for bringing evidence that will change others’ minds. That is not what scientific publishing is doing.

Martina: On the Bycelium website, it says “Academia is broken.” Researchers understand this intuitively. Could you explain what is broken?

If only reviewers read your paper, accept it and move on, what impact did it have? Publication itself is not what matters.

Mathïs: Academia is not completely broken yet because it still holds, but it is in decline. The decline has accelerated in recent years. The incentive systems are broken. It worked at lower scales of science but not at the current scale. Publishing has become the objective. When publishing becomes the objective, we lose science. The objective should be to have an impact on the world or at least on the beliefs of others. Providing evidence should convince others. If only reviewers read your paper, accept it and move on, what impact did it have? Publication itself is not what matters.

Martina: The usual response is that high-impact journals ensure quality. What is your answer?

Mathïs: Peer review before publication is not a good evaluation mechanism. History of science shows this. Einstein would not have been approved by his peers. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics was ridiculed his whole life and it’s only decades after his death that his work was recognized by his peers. Science is about providing evidence that convinces others in the long term, not before publication. 

Another broken aspect is that only positive results are rewarded. Negative results are hard to publish, yet there are many more negative results than positive ones. Labs redo the same negative results because they are not published and because of hype phenomenons. 

Today if you publish an AI based work, you will have much higher chances of being accepted because of the hype. Journals care about prestige, not long-term scientific progress.

Now, about high-impact factor journals, what do high ranking journals want? To be read for big new discoveries, even if they are wrong. Hype drives publication Today if you publish an AI based work, you will have much higher chances of being accepted because of the hype. Journals care about prestige, not long-term scientific progress, not truth.

Martina: Everyone knows high-prestige papers that are wrong. I have seen reviewers ignore wrong foundations because conclusions were exciting.

Mathïs: This shows that academia rewards looking like being right, not being right. When I was doing experiments, I focused on reproducibility and clear code to be able to convince others. The system does not reward that. It rewards doing just enough to pass the reviewer filter. Now with generative AI, text is no longer trustworthy. Articles and reviews can be AI written. We are heading toward AI-written articles reviewed by AI, which makes no sense for science.

Martina: Why do we still have this system?

Mathïs: Journals were tools for diffusion. Now their main function is prestige. You publish for prestige to get grants and survive. Journals became evaluators. Editors filter science. Careers are tied to prestige given by citations and impact factors. This creates a Nash equilibrium that is not pareto optimal. People stay in the current system because otherwise they are left out and cannot live, even if we would be better of with a new system

Martina: What is the vision of Bycelium?

Mathïs: What matters is realigning incentives. Instead of paying to publish, scientists should be paid for their contributions, depending on how much they changed the mind of others. 

Science is not a binary system of accept or reject. A peer-review label does not make something more or less true. Science is a dance with hypotheses’s credibility and evidence.

That view that updates of beliefs are a way to measure the scientific impact comes from Bayesian epistemology, where nothing should be considered strictly true or false, but with nuanced credibility that can be updated by evidence. Science is not a binary system of accept or reject. A peer-review label does not make something more or less true. Science is a dance with hypotheses’s credibility and evidence.

The goal of Bycelium is to turn that philosophy into a well designed market where scientists are rewarded for evidence that changes the mind of others. As a young scientist, you can challenge a claim if you think it is wrong and especially if you have done a negative replication that you have no incentive to publish. As the author of a study, if you are challenged and believe in your work, you should take the bet. 

This creates interesting incentives. If you know something is wrong, you have incentives to bet and provide evidence. If new evidence goes against your position, you have incentives to update your beliefs quickly. This gives speed to science that we have lost to bureaucratic procedures.

Martina: Wow, that is so out of this world! But like any system it will be gamed, no? How do you prevent misuse?

Mathïs: That is the heart of market design. The system should be strategy-proof, meaning that if people try to manipulate, they will lose to fair players. There can be feedback mechanisms on credibility or prestige. Fraud, citation rings, and manipulation could reduce credibility. In the current system, negative feedback mechanisms like retractions are rare because they require an investigation that is not rewarded and even when they come through, they have weak effects in practice.

Universities also have bad incentives. They are pushed toward prestige and rankings, not good science. This makes them cover their members in case of fraud, malpractice and lack of rigor. I think alternatives are possible, but building credibility for them will take time and great effort, we need all the help we can get! 

Martina: How would a transition to such a different alternative system work?

Hopefully one day, early career researchers will challenge established claims and gain prestige without the need of high-tier journals, for the quality of their work itself.

Mathïs: The system is not incompatible with the current publishing scheme. Because it is post-publication, scientists can be in both systems. Before any transition the goal is to experiment to see if this is a viable alternative that scientists actually like. The switch will happen when credibility is established and funders allocate money to flow within that new system. Hopefully one day, early career researchers will challenge established claims and gain prestige without the need of high-tier journals, for the quality of their work itself.

At Bycelium, we are building a prototype, our goal is testing, breaking, and fixing it until it is robust enough and actually favors scientists that change the mind of others. We will need all the help we can get to that end. 

Martina: As a scientific writing trainer, I see how much researchers suffer. It is hopeful to see alternatives.

Mathïs: In ten years, I want people to ask why we accepted this system. With AI and political changes impacting science, 2026 is the right moment for a change. Even if I am not the one, alternatives will exist. What matters is that people try new systems and inspire others to follow.

Martina: Thank you so much, Mathïs.

Mathïs: Thank you. It was a pleasure.