VDP-144 The Longevist Annual Review

TLDR: This proposal asks the VitaDAO community to fund The Longevist for 2024. The following are a list of The Longevist’s inaugural year 2023 accomplishments and 2024 and beyond plans.

Background: The Longevist is a quarterly issued preprint overlay journal where key opinion leaders in both academia and industry vote on chain on the top preprints, to provide a new way to identify the best longevity research. Currently, The Longevist has 30+ voters “Curators” each quarter. Therefore, it contrasts quantitatively with journals in that there are many more voters on the research. Also, arguably the voters are more experienced than journal editors. In addition to these differences, VitaDAO started The Longevist for several additional reasons:

To increase VitaDAO’s visibility amongst longevity researchers To allow researchers to be compensated for their time reviewing research To grow the longevity research community’s awareness in onchain technologies (through VITA token compensation for Curators / referral bounties for readers, Snapshot voting mechanism and general intro to VitaDAO/DeSci).

Proposal: We, The Longevist team, ask the VitaDAO community to continue supporting The Longevist for 2024. We believe it is in line with VitaDAO’s 2024-25 Mandate in that it will help to identify commercially viable early-stage longevity projects whilst also fostering community growth and bringing increased crypto awareness.

To highlight why we think The Longevist deserves further funding, we highlight the 2023 achievements below:

The Longevist achievements:

• We have onboarded 30+ key opinion leaders (aka The Longevist Curators) into the VitaDAO ecosystem as token holders, including top academics and industry experts.
• The inaugural edition of The Longevist was launched in July 2023. We have now delivered 4 Editions (one each quarter of 2023). Each of the top 3 preprints of each quarter are awarded “Curators’ Choice” status and adorned with human:AI hybrid cover art.

• Our unique curation style has helped identify and promote top longevity research, with several Longevist-featured preprints having already been published in top journals.

• The Longevist was assigned an International Standard Serial Number ([ISSN 2817-8831])(ISSN 2817-8831 (Online) | The longevist | The ISSN Portal). ISSNs provide publications with a global identity, making them recognizable and accessible worldwide. They signal a level of professionalism and will help legitimize The Longevist as a resource alongside all other academic journals.
• Our Twitter page is already followed by some prominent people in the Longevity field, including David Sinclair, Steve Horvath and The Methuselah Foundation. And our presence caught the attention of the Journal, Rejuvenation Research who recently highlighted The Longevist as a development in the field.

• Formed a collaboration with DeSciLabs - all Longevist preprints were put onchain via DeSciLabs Nodes. This provides provenance and permanence for each preprint.
• In advanced talks with one aging journal to have all Curators’ Choice preprints eligible to go straight to peer-review.
• Collaborated with the founders of BioRxiv to have Longevist-featured preprints included in their newly introduced “Community Reviews”.

In surveying the Curators after 2023,

• On average, each curator shared The Longevist with 14 colleagues. Thus, potentially up to 500 more longevity researchers know of VitaDAO now.
• All of them who responded (16) said they would vote in 2024
• None of them responded they wouldn’t take less compensation given that VITA price has appreciated.

In general, the Curators seemed enthusiastic about continuing their participation and in growing awareness for The Longevist and VitaDAO.

Integration of Longevist longlisted preprints into Dealflow for sourcing new projects

The Longevist team generated a longlist of 180+ longevity preprints from 2023. This was created by utilising a social listening tool, database scraping, referral prizes and ear-to-the-ground efforts. Code was created to automatically categorise the preprints by hallmark of ageing, disease indication etc. A CommercializationGPT was created to analyze the preprint content and determine Technology Readiness Level (TRL) to identify ones that have potential for commercialization.

Our “sourcing champions” then identified preprints which they would like to pursue, with ~65 preprints having already been assigned a champion.

Those preprints with commercialization potential will been integrated into dealflow as a top-of-funnel source of topical research.

2024 Plans

Objective 1: Expand and Develop Curator Network

Key Results:

• Increase the number of curators to a minimum of 80 by the end of Q4.
• Onboard 25% of our existing curators as senior reviewers, and have them review at least 1 project in their domain of expertise by the end of Q4.

Objective 2: Strengthen Outreach and Engagement

Key Results:

• Establish partnerships with at least 3 aging societies, 5 institutes, and 5 universities to promote collaboration and engagement by the end of Q3.
• Increase Twitter followers to 5000 through targeted content related to aging societies, institutes, and universities by the end of Q4.

Objective 3: Grow Academic Reader Community & Participation

Key Results:

• Achieve an increase in the subscription of readers to our mailing list from 70 to 500 by Q4.
• In discussions to form a journal club collaboration with lifespan.io.
• In form all longlisted corresponding authors that their work has been selected. Invite the senior authors of Longevist-featured preprints (top 10 of each Q) to be Curators.

Objective 4: Develop and Distribute Educational Material for the General Public

Key Results:

• Collaborate with The Sheekey Science show to launch educational materials tailored for both the general public and academics on the importance and impact of our work.
• Achieve a reach of 5,000 views/downloads of the educational materials across platforms by the end of Q4.

Objective 5: Host Annual Longevist Award Ceremony

Key Results:

• Successfully plan and execute the inaugural virtual annual award ceremony, recognizing the top Longevity & Aging Research preprints of 2023. To prioritise, following delivery of Q1 '24 (with an aim to host earlier, ~March, in future years).
• Secure partnerships to increase reach and publicity (see objective 2).
• Have 100 attendees in the virtual award ceremony.

Budget

2023 Budget awarded

• Curator Compensation: 100k VITA maximum allowance (used ~60k VITA)
• Ops: 25k VITA + 50k USDC

2024 Budget ask

• Curator Compensation: 25k VITA max
• Ops: 15k VITA + 35k USDC, including running salaries, inaugural annual award ceremony prizes, preprint referral prizes, quarterly Sheekey Science Show content.

Timeline

• 2023: Recruit curators, build website and publish first 4 quarterly editions
• 2024: Grow readership/community and have first longevity-identified projects pass through the dealflow funnel.
• 2025: Attract donations / sponsorships etc to initiate financial independence from VitaDAO funding.

Benefits to VitaDAO

• Reputational value from supporting longevity science.
• Increased awareness from this value-added outreach project, leading to more funding applications from having more academics and KOLs learn about VitaDAO
• An increase in critical mass through onboarding KOLs into the VitaDAO ecosystem.
• Decentralisation of governance to mission-aligned prominent people.
• New source of dealflow from The Longevist longlist preprint database - potential projects are then pursued by “sourcing champions”