4 ms·

Here's my naive view: 1) Upload PDF of a paper to a server 2) Reviewers get notified and do their thing 3) Paper is accepted and set to public (or rejected) C

by kriro 11y ago

Here's my naive view: 1) Upload PDF of a paper to a server 2) Reviewers get notified and do their thing 3) Paper is accepted and set to public (or rejected) Collecting related papers and typesetting them and whatnot should not be default but rather addons. All that matters is getting the paper, quality control and making it available. No need for set release dates and quarterly, just kanban it. As long as you have enough reviewers who are willing to do the work that should work. Optional: 4) Allow git style updates to the paper (author needs write access for this) 5) Comment system (potentially mark papers as "not so great after all, should not have made it through review")

sre_ops 11y ago
There are very few things in common between the accepted manuscript that arrives at the publisher and the paper that you read which is why even society journals outsource paper processing to the likes of Informa and Elsevier
exelius 11y ago
A big part of "open access" is "accessibility" -- and a big part of accessibility is consistent formatting, typesetting, abstracts, etc. Without this, scientific papers become much harder to process electronically and turn into semi-structured data that is machine-readable. You need an organization to take stewardship of this process and escalate when the process breaks down, because all processes have escalations and exceptions. You also need a group capable of certifying experts in a field. In journals, this is done by the editor - who is usually an expert, or at least enough of an expert to know who the experts in a field are. What you described is basically Reddit -- and there's nothing wrong with Reddit, but I think it's a little unstructured for scientific discourse.
xorcist 11y ago
> Paper is accepted and set to public (or rejected) Is this even relevant post-scarcity? Just make everything available all the time, just like the rest of the web works. If it is obvious how many citations a paper have, and of their respective quality, that would carry over to make a quality index for the paper itself. Low quality papers would languish as only friends and family would bother with the.
- Fomite 11y ago
  What about a new medical study that hasn't had time to gather citations? What is its "quality index"?
  - xorcist 11y ago
    What is its status today, before it is published? It's very low, but there is a system in place to get a select few peers to review it. Could there not be a similar system of reviewers in place, without necessarily making a difference between "published" and "rejected"?

by kriro 11y ago

sre_ops 11y ago

There are very few things in common between the accepted manuscript that arrives at the publisher and the paper that you read which is why even society journals outsource paper processing to the likes of Informa and Elsevier

exelius 11y ago

A big part of "open access" is "accessibility" -- and a big part of accessibility is consistent formatting, typesetting, abstracts, etc. Without this, scientific papers become much harder to process electronically and turn into semi-structured data that is machine-readable. You need an organization to take stewardship of this process and escalate when the process breaks down, because all processes have escalations and exceptions. You also need a group capable of certifying experts in a field. In journals, this is done by the editor - who is usually an expert, or at least enough of an expert to know who the experts in a field are. What you described is basically Reddit -- and there's nothing wrong with Reddit, but I think it's a little unstructured for scientific discourse.

xorcist 11y ago

> Paper is accepted and set to public (or rejected) Is this even relevant post-scarcity? Just make everything available all the time, just like the rest of the web works. If it is obvious how many citations a paper have, and of their respective quality, that would carry over to make a quality index for the paper itself. Low quality papers would languish as only friends and family would bother with the.

Fomite 11y ago
What about a new medical study that hasn't had time to gather citations? What is its "quality index"?
- xorcist 11y ago
  What is its status today, before it is published? It's very low, but there is a system in place to get a select few peers to review it. Could there not be a similar system of reviewers in place, without necessarily making a difference between "published" and "rejected"?