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In related news, the academic publishing problem is still unsolved. There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open

In related news, the academic publishing problem is still unsolved. There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals and their role as a gatekeeper for scientific relevance, advancement and funding.

deleted 9y ago
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chrisseaton 9y ago
The solution is technically easy - reciprocal peer review so you pay other people to review your papers by agreeing to review others’ papers, and then publishing on arXiv. Computer science basically does this but replaces arXiv with an industry body the ACM. I don’t see why it needs to be any more complex than that.
- prepend 9y ago
  This is hard for new authors as you don’t know if the reviewer is competent. So new authors would have to pay. So a problem.
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    I don’t literally mean you do n reviews to get your review - I mean members of the community generally spend some time reviewing. If you're new you will get some of your papers reviewed before you start to contribute back but it’s not a problem. It’s how it works now in CS.
- amelius 9y ago
  Can't we have a system where a paper is not necessarily reviewed at first, but as time goes by, more and more reviewers endorse the paper?
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    The review process gives authors feedback which they use to improve their paper before it's published, and authors usually appreciate that. It's also a chance to stop major errors being published, and again authors usually appreciate things like that being caught before the paper becomes public.
    - RosanaAnaDana 9y ago
      I mean, why not though? We do it with wikipedia. Maybe a publication could be submitted for review, but not made public (like, its up on the wiki, but not 'publicly view-able yet, only available to editors).
      - anjc 9y ago
        This is what happens, it's the "peer review" thing being described. The reviews are issued so that corrections can be made before publication.
  - RosanaAnaDana 9y ago
    Wikipedia/ Stackoverflow style review process. Also, ffs can we get hyperlinked citations? Its fung ridiculous that I can't just click the link for your citation and go to that paper.
- SeanLuke 9y ago
  > reciprocal peer review so you pay other people to review your papers by agreeing to review others’ papers, and then publishing on arXiv. This is fraught with ethical problems.
  - bicubic 9y ago
    It doesn’t need to be directly reciprocal. You could have a system where having your paper peer reviewed costs X tokens, and you earn tokens by peer reviewing other papers that don’t have citation links to yours. Or you buy tokens with cash which sustains a fund for external reviewers. Or other people can transfer their tokens to you. Would that still have problems?
  - RosanaAnaDana 9y ago
    Sure, but the identical exchange of value occurs in the current system, it just goes unsaid/unspoken. You review my journal and maybe ignore some of the problems, poor assumptions, whatever crap I used to make the sausage, just let me get it published; I do the same for you. You may not 'know' who is reviewing your journal, but at least in the natural sciences, there are so few technically qualified individuals to review some very domain specific publications, so its almost inevitable that although you may not know for sure who is reviewing your paper, you can figure it out without too much work. Since both reviewers and authors benefit from getting their own work published, there is a silent consensus for letting bad work slip through.
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    No obviously I don't mean you review a person's paper and they review yours - use your common sense, mate. I mean if you publish a paper and get four reviews, you then review another four papers at some point - perhaps at an entirely different conference later that year. You just make sure you review at least 4n papers for each n papers you publish.
- a3_nm 9y ago
  > Computer science basically does this but replaces arXiv with an industry body the ACM. There's a big difference: arXiv papers are open-access (everyone can download them), but ACM papers are closed-access (you need a subscription to read them). I wish that computer science research were published on arXiv, but we're not there yet...
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    But: 1) the ACM lets each author link to their papers on the ACM library with free access. https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/acm-author-izer-service https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/acm-author-izer-ser... 2) in practice you could always find pre-print copies of any CS paper on their author's website already and everyone knew and nobody ever cared 3) the ACM also let you negotiate an agreement so that you retain copyright for the paper so you can publish it yourself - my company does this
    - FabHK 9y ago
      Re 2), there were instances I seem to recall when academic publishers went after authors that had preprints of their own papers on their own website.
    - a3_nm 9y ago
      I disagree with these points. 1) Essentially no one knows about the author-izer system or understands how it works, especially outside academia. Readers in companies, poorer countries, etc., can't be expected to guess that the way to read an article is to go to the author's webpage and follow author-izer links (assuming they have been set up). What these potential readers will do is: search something on Google (or follow a link from somewhere else), hit the paywalled ACM DL page, give up. This convoluted system of "open-access from one place, closed-access from another" makes no sense. 2) For authors who actually post preprints of their work, yes, you can read it this way. But then you end up with multiple versions of the same work, that are often subtly different: does the author's preprint integrate reviewer feedback? does it fix some bugs that were found after the camera-ready version was submitted? And anyways, preprints posted on authors' websites usually disappear when they change institutions or retire, so it's not a good solution. 3) Yes, you can retain copyright on papers published with ACM, but then you need to give them an exclusive license to publish, so this still limits what you can do with your work (besides some narrowly worded exceptions). There is also a 3rd option of making the work open-access with no exclusive transfer, but this costs at least $700 per article, which is obviously excessive compared to the actual costs of hosting a 12-page PDF. So I don't think it's fair to compare publishing with ACM and publishing on arXiv, because ACM is not open-access and publishing with them requires you to pay excessive fees or sign agreements restricting how you can publish your work, i.e., the opposite of what's in the interest of science.
deleted 9y ago
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cm2187 9y ago
Do you really need peer review? Isn’t number of citations a form of peer review? Of course you sort of need to assign a reputation to these citations.
- TheCondor 9y ago
  You absolutely need peer review. You’d be stunned at some of the rejected submissions
  - barry-cotter 9y ago
    Absolute crap will be roundly ignored with or without peer review. Science and the Humanities worked fine before peer review and if it’s dropped they’ll work fine again. If Grigori Perelman puts another paper on arxiv that’s groundbreaking people will look at it without benefit of peer review, just like the last one.
    - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
      > Absolute crap will be roundly ignored with or without peer review. Things might be ignored, but only after a person has already wasted their time looking at it and determining it is crap. It was harder for cranks to publish back when journals were purely physical and a crank would have to come up with the printing costs himself. Now that anyone can publish for free on the internet, peer review is even more important for establishing what content out there is worth paying attention to and which is not.
      - barry-cotter 9y ago
        You neglect the costs of submission, revision, resubmisssion etc. which are borne by the authors. Even if we assume that all involved are pure of heart and no one is deliberately delaying publication of their rivals’ work submission to publication in economics is on the order of two years. This is insane so the actual intellectual conversation has moved to working papers with final publication being in a journal being as much for archival and career progression metrics as anything else. I believe the situation in much of computer science is similar, with conference papers serving as the workaround for the fact that pre publication peer review is unbearably slow, not working papers. Peer review happens anyway, but faster, and in public, without the insanity of revise and resubmit. Journals are not where the action is in Economics or Computer Science. It works for them. Why not for everybody?
Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals This process doesn't necessarily need to be funded. In my own field, most journals are published by learned societies. They were founded with endowments large enough to cover the costs of publication (i.e. printing) in perpetuity, but the work of editors and peer review is unpaid. This doesn't strike most of us as a problem. Even the big publishers do not compensate peer reviewers or sometimes even editors. They don't even provide typesetting or copyediting anymore -- authors are expected to provide camera-ready output. So, a lot of the money being gained by the big publishers does not actually go to fund the whole process of creating those journals.
- winter_blue 9y ago
  > Even the big publishers do not compensate peer reviewers or sometimes even editors. They don't even provide typesetting or copyediting anymore It sounds like they (major journal publishers) provide practically no value whatsoever. Why even use them then?
  - m-watson 9y ago
    I'm not sure the previous poster is 100% correct but honestly I have not looked into it in depth. I know the times I have gone through it the journals did provide typesetting and copy-editing for some aspects of the paper. However, to get to your actual question a big reason people use journals is simply the name. As a researcher getting your paper published in Nature is not only big because the prestige but presumably more people read/see nature articles so you have a better chance at high impact. TL;DR Their value is their reputation and reach.
  - dhimes 9y ago
    Exactly the point.
  - castle-bravo 9y ago
    My incomplete understanding is that publishing in big-name journals provides prestige and improves funding prospects for academicians. Since academia is very competitive, researchers will do whatever it takes to publish in the most presitgious journals. In other words, they provide a brand that researchers want to associate with; analogous to how rappers mention luxury brands (sometimes with but often without being paid) in their songs. I don't know what benefits reviewers receive, but they are gatekeepers to the journal's brand, so conceivably they are able to obtain some benefit to themselves.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Peer review is rarely compensated, publishing revenue goes to the publisher, not the volunteer reviewers.
denzil_correa 9y ago
> There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals I have been a peer reviewer over the last 5 years or so for multiple journals and conferences in Computer Science like Elsevier, IEEE etc. Not once have I receive any remuneration for my comments in the article. Most of us do this as voluntary community service.
- achileas 9y ago
  Yet the publishers get paid exorbitant fees for access to work they didn't pay for.
- FabHK 9y ago
  Would you consider not reviewing for Elsevier anymore, given their practices?
  - mercer 9y ago
    Yeah, while it's easy to criticise, based on Elsevier's reputation, reviewing for them strikes me as somewhat unethical by most standards. EDIT: by most standards that at least don't involve some situation of comfort. If you're comfortable in academia, you're probably enabling some unethical shit, is what I've come to believe. It's up to you to decide if you can live with the degree of it.
- anjc 9y ago
  You're the resource :) The alternative to you doing it for free would be paying someone. Having said that, I presume that you're doing it because you work in a certain role, and because it's advantageous to your career. I.e. you're getting paid by someone, and it's assumed that you'll review as part of your job.
- vkou 9y ago
  I'd imagine that for every Elsevier-published paper that you review, that is a non-Elsevier-published paper that you did not get a chance to review. Would it be possible for you to prioritize review of open-access work? (This is a question, not a criticism!)
GahMatar 9y ago
Peer reviewers are unpaid. Editors are usually unpaid though some large / prestigious journals can manage a few paid staff to edit/layout, the publishing decisions are usually taken by committees of unpaid volunteers (renumeration is basically reputational.)
ablaba 9y ago
Relevant article: Open Access and ACM https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226357-open-access-and-acm/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226357-open-access-and...
nell 9y ago
I’m not an academic so forgive me for a noob question. Is there a good introductory essay/book on how the academic publishing industry is setup, the workflow and the incentive structure for each party involved?
followrosemary 9y ago
Here's a solution: https://medium.com/@followrosemary/a-blockchain-solution-for-the-academic-publising-crisis-token-curated-registries-d56c62c48e35 https://medium.com/@followrosemary/a-blockchain-solution-for... A token-curated registry (TCR) is an emerging model of information curation developed by Mike Goldin & Simon de la Rouviere from Consensys. It's an incentive system which decentralises the work of creating and maintaining high-quality repositories of valuable information. Academic publishing seems like an ideal use-case for this model. There's a frenzy of activity going on in this space at the moment, and hundreds of details to work out - rather than get wrapped up in theorising, we want to release a v1.0 quickly and learn from there. Please reach out to me via LinkedIn if you want to contribute to the pilot, or can help us raise awareness among the academic community. We're a small but dedicated group, open to partnering with universities, journals, crypto-developers, and other interested parties (especially academics). Note: we have no plans or desire to make money out of this project. We're a group of well-connected enthusiasts who want to make headway on solving this problem. Here's Mike Goldin's intro to TCRs, for context: https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0-61a232f8dac7 https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0...
RosanaAnaDana 9y ago
Purely open-sourced publication and review; you have to publish your data along with your paper. A wikipedia style review process (or maybe more of a stackoverflow/ wikipedia hybrid). The biggest and most critical miss of the whole process is not having the data a paper is based on published along with the paper. If something is irreproducible, is it really scientific? If I don't have your data, can I really reproduce your results?
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  If you can’t, the results are invalid. I can give you data that say anything. The reproduction that counts is where you obtain similar data independently. If you want to validate that my claims are justified BY MY DATA then you need my data. If you want to validate that my claims are justified by the universe, you need to get your own data and should avoid being polluted by mine. Having said that, I competely support publishing data by default. But not for the reason you state.
scythe 9y ago
As an employee at an open access publisher, I can't agree that funding the peer review process is the biggest problem. Our surveys of our own reviewers have shown that only a small (<20%) minority of reviewers wish to be paid a fee for their reviews. The majority of referees prefer the current model of crediting volunteer reviewers in a regularly published "acknowledgements" article. I assume the incentive may be that reviewers show these to their tenure committee. In fact the most common complaint from peer reviewers is about the length of the review period. Because open-access journals have authors as our customers, the market pressure is to provide excellent customer service, and authors prefer publishers who will process their papers quickly. This pressure is passed on to reviewers who must complete reviews much faster than the old norms under Springer.
hyperbovine 9y ago
> resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals I think you may be unfamiliar with how the reviewing process works. I get an e-mail asking me to review an article for a journal. If I say yes, I donate between two and ten unpaid hours of my time producing a review. After I am done with my review, I send it to the AE. The associate editor donates additional hours of his/her time reading my review, plus one or two others, along with potentially the entire manuscript, in order make a decision on the paper. This recommendation gets forwarded to the editor, who makes the final call on publication. With few exceptions (the only ones I'm aware of being the biggies like Nature, Science and Cell) every single person involved in this process is uncompensated. In some cases the editor may receive a small honorarium, but it's trifling compared to amount of time it takes to run a large, prestigious journal. You're absolutely correct that reviewing is a resource intensive process. But you're wrong if you believe that the publishers are shouldering a significant part of the resource burden. This is exactly why people are so pissed off when these same publishers turn around and charge our own campus libraries a five-figure sum to access the same journals that we work basically for free to produce.
agjacobson 9y ago
Funding, or a startup enterprise, is certainly needed to administer the peer review process. I'm willing to bet it would be less than $10 per paper in universal use. No money is needed to pay reviewers. In fact the savings would be so great, their could be a courtesy payment. The ruinous censorship and false ownership of the publishers should be broken.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

chrisseaton 9y ago

The solution is technically easy - reciprocal peer review so you pay other people to review your papers by agreeing to review others’ papers, and then publishing on arXiv. Computer science basically does this but replaces arXiv with an industry body the ACM. I don’t see why it needs to be any more complex than that.

prepend 9y ago
This is hard for new authors as you don’t know if the reviewer is competent. So new authors would have to pay. So a problem.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  I don’t literally mean you do n reviews to get your review - I mean members of the community generally spend some time reviewing. If you're new you will get some of your papers reviewed before you start to contribute back but it’s not a problem. It’s how it works now in CS.
amelius 9y ago
Can't we have a system where a paper is not necessarily reviewed at first, but as time goes by, more and more reviewers endorse the paper?
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  The review process gives authors feedback which they use to improve their paper before it's published, and authors usually appreciate that. It's also a chance to stop major errors being published, and again authors usually appreciate things like that being caught before the paper becomes public.
  - RosanaAnaDana 9y ago
    I mean, why not though? We do it with wikipedia. Maybe a publication could be submitted for review, but not made public (like, its up on the wiki, but not 'publicly view-able yet, only available to editors).
    - anjc 9y ago
      This is what happens, it's the "peer review" thing being described. The reviews are issued so that corrections can be made before publication.
- RosanaAnaDana 9y ago
  Wikipedia/ Stackoverflow style review process. Also, ffs can we get hyperlinked citations? Its fung ridiculous that I can't just click the link for your citation and go to that paper.
SeanLuke 9y ago
> reciprocal peer review so you pay other people to review your papers by agreeing to review others’ papers, and then publishing on arXiv. This is fraught with ethical problems.
- bicubic 9y ago
  It doesn’t need to be directly reciprocal. You could have a system where having your paper peer reviewed costs X tokens, and you earn tokens by peer reviewing other papers that don’t have citation links to yours. Or you buy tokens with cash which sustains a fund for external reviewers. Or other people can transfer their tokens to you. Would that still have problems?
- RosanaAnaDana 9y ago
  Sure, but the identical exchange of value occurs in the current system, it just goes unsaid/unspoken. You review my journal and maybe ignore some of the problems, poor assumptions, whatever crap I used to make the sausage, just let me get it published; I do the same for you. You may not 'know' who is reviewing your journal, but at least in the natural sciences, there are so few technically qualified individuals to review some very domain specific publications, so its almost inevitable that although you may not know for sure who is reviewing your paper, you can figure it out without too much work. Since both reviewers and authors benefit from getting their own work published, there is a silent consensus for letting bad work slip through.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  No obviously I don't mean you review a person's paper and they review yours - use your common sense, mate. I mean if you publish a paper and get four reviews, you then review another four papers at some point - perhaps at an entirely different conference later that year. You just make sure you review at least 4n papers for each n papers you publish.
a3_nm 9y ago
> Computer science basically does this but replaces arXiv with an industry body the ACM. There's a big difference: arXiv papers are open-access (everyone can download them), but ACM papers are closed-access (you need a subscription to read them). I wish that computer science research were published on arXiv, but we're not there yet...
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  But: 1) the ACM lets each author link to their papers on the ACM library with free access. https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/acm-author-izer-service https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/acm-author-izer-ser... 2) in practice you could always find pre-print copies of any CS paper on their author's website already and everyone knew and nobody ever cared 3) the ACM also let you negotiate an agreement so that you retain copyright for the paper so you can publish it yourself - my company does this
  - FabHK 9y ago
    Re 2), there were instances I seem to recall when academic publishers went after authors that had preprints of their own papers on their own website.
  - a3_nm 9y ago
    I disagree with these points. 1) Essentially no one knows about the author-izer system or understands how it works, especially outside academia. Readers in companies, poorer countries, etc., can't be expected to guess that the way to read an article is to go to the author's webpage and follow author-izer links (assuming they have been set up). What these potential readers will do is: search something on Google (or follow a link from somewhere else), hit the paywalled ACM DL page, give up. This convoluted system of "open-access from one place, closed-access from another" makes no sense. 2) For authors who actually post preprints of their work, yes, you can read it this way. But then you end up with multiple versions of the same work, that are often subtly different: does the author's preprint integrate reviewer feedback? does it fix some bugs that were found after the camera-ready version was submitted? And anyways, preprints posted on authors' websites usually disappear when they change institutions or retire, so it's not a good solution. 3) Yes, you can retain copyright on papers published with ACM, but then you need to give them an exclusive license to publish, so this still limits what you can do with your work (besides some narrowly worded exceptions). There is also a 3rd option of making the work open-access with no exclusive transfer, but this costs at least $700 per article, which is obviously excessive compared to the actual costs of hosting a 12-page PDF. So I don't think it's fair to compare publishing with ACM and publishing on arXiv, because ACM is not open-access and publishing with them requires you to pay excessive fees or sign agreements restricting how you can publish your work, i.e., the opposite of what's in the interest of science.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

cm2187 9y ago

Do you really need peer review? Isn’t number of citations a form of peer review? Of course you sort of need to assign a reputation to these citations.

TheCondor 9y ago
You absolutely need peer review. You’d be stunned at some of the rejected submissions
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  Absolute crap will be roundly ignored with or without peer review. Science and the Humanities worked fine before peer review and if it’s dropped they’ll work fine again. If Grigori Perelman puts another paper on arxiv that’s groundbreaking people will look at it without benefit of peer review, just like the last one.
  - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
    > Absolute crap will be roundly ignored with or without peer review. Things might be ignored, but only after a person has already wasted their time looking at it and determining it is crap. It was harder for cranks to publish back when journals were purely physical and a crank would have to come up with the printing costs himself. Now that anyone can publish for free on the internet, peer review is even more important for establishing what content out there is worth paying attention to and which is not.
    - barry-cotter 9y ago
      You neglect the costs of submission, revision, resubmisssion etc. which are borne by the authors. Even if we assume that all involved are pure of heart and no one is deliberately delaying publication of their rivals’ work submission to publication in economics is on the order of two years. This is insane so the actual intellectual conversation has moved to working papers with final publication being in a journal being as much for archival and career progression metrics as anything else. I believe the situation in much of computer science is similar, with conference papers serving as the workaround for the fact that pre publication peer review is unbearably slow, not working papers. Peer review happens anyway, but faster, and in public, without the insanity of revise and resubmit. Journals are not where the action is in Economics or Computer Science. It works for them. Why not for everybody?

Mediterraneo10 9y ago

> There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals This process doesn't necessarily need to be funded. In my own field, most journals are published by learned societies. They were founded with endowments large enough to cover the costs of publication (i.e. printing) in perpetuity, but the work of editors and peer review is unpaid. This doesn't strike most of us as a problem. Even the big publishers do not compensate peer reviewers or sometimes even editors. They don't even provide typesetting or copyediting anymore -- authors are expected to provide camera-ready output. So, a lot of the money being gained by the big publishers does not actually go to fund the whole process of creating those journals.

winter_blue 9y ago
> Even the big publishers do not compensate peer reviewers or sometimes even editors. They don't even provide typesetting or copyediting anymore It sounds like they (major journal publishers) provide practically no value whatsoever. Why even use them then?
- m-watson 9y ago
  I'm not sure the previous poster is 100% correct but honestly I have not looked into it in depth. I know the times I have gone through it the journals did provide typesetting and copy-editing for some aspects of the paper. However, to get to your actual question a big reason people use journals is simply the name. As a researcher getting your paper published in Nature is not only big because the prestige but presumably more people read/see nature articles so you have a better chance at high impact. TL;DR Their value is their reputation and reach.
- dhimes 9y ago
  Exactly the point.
- castle-bravo 9y ago
  My incomplete understanding is that publishing in big-name journals provides prestige and improves funding prospects for academicians. Since academia is very competitive, researchers will do whatever it takes to publish in the most presitgious journals. In other words, they provide a brand that researchers want to associate with; analogous to how rappers mention luxury brands (sometimes with but often without being paid) in their songs. I don't know what benefits reviewers receive, but they are gatekeepers to the journal's brand, so conceivably they are able to obtain some benefit to themselves.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

Peer review is rarely compensated, publishing revenue goes to the publisher, not the volunteer reviewers.

denzil_correa 9y ago

> There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals I have been a peer reviewer over the last 5 years or so for multiple journals and conferences in Computer Science like Elsevier, IEEE etc. Not once have I receive any remuneration for my comments in the article. Most of us do this as voluntary community service.

achileas 9y ago
Yet the publishers get paid exorbitant fees for access to work they didn't pay for.
FabHK 9y ago
Would you consider not reviewing for Elsevier anymore, given their practices?
- mercer 9y ago
  Yeah, while it's easy to criticise, based on Elsevier's reputation, reviewing for them strikes me as somewhat unethical by most standards. EDIT: by most standards that at least don't involve some situation of comfort. If you're comfortable in academia, you're probably enabling some unethical shit, is what I've come to believe. It's up to you to decide if you can live with the degree of it.
anjc 9y ago
You're the resource :) The alternative to you doing it for free would be paying someone. Having said that, I presume that you're doing it because you work in a certain role, and because it's advantageous to your career. I.e. you're getting paid by someone, and it's assumed that you'll review as part of your job.
vkou 9y ago
I'd imagine that for every Elsevier-published paper that you review, that is a non-Elsevier-published paper that you did not get a chance to review. Would it be possible for you to prioritize review of open-access work? (This is a question, not a criticism!)

GahMatar 9y ago

Peer reviewers are unpaid. Editors are usually unpaid though some large / prestigious journals can manage a few paid staff to edit/layout, the publishing decisions are usually taken by committees of unpaid volunteers (renumeration is basically reputational.)

ablaba 9y ago

Relevant article: Open Access and ACM https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226357-open-access-and-acm/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226357-open-access-and...

nell 9y ago

I’m not an academic so forgive me for a noob question. Is there a good introductory essay/book on how the academic publishing industry is setup, the workflow and the incentive structure for each party involved?

followrosemary 9y ago

Here's a solution: https://medium.com/@followrosemary/a-blockchain-solution-for-the-academic-publising-crisis-token-curated-registries-d56c62c48e35 https://medium.com/@followrosemary/a-blockchain-solution-for... A token-curated registry (TCR) is an emerging model of information curation developed by Mike Goldin & Simon de la Rouviere from Consensys. It's an incentive system which decentralises the work of creating and maintaining high-quality repositories of valuable information. Academic publishing seems like an ideal use-case for this model. There's a frenzy of activity going on in this space at the moment, and hundreds of details to work out - rather than get wrapped up in theorising, we want to release a v1.0 quickly and learn from there. Please reach out to me via LinkedIn if you want to contribute to the pilot, or can help us raise awareness among the academic community. We're a small but dedicated group, open to partnering with universities, journals, crypto-developers, and other interested parties (especially academics). Note: we have no plans or desire to make money out of this project. We're a group of well-connected enthusiasts who want to make headway on solving this problem. Here's Mike Goldin's intro to TCRs, for context: https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0-61a232f8dac7 https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0...

RosanaAnaDana 9y ago

Purely open-sourced publication and review; you have to publish your data along with your paper. A wikipedia style review process (or maybe more of a stackoverflow/ wikipedia hybrid). The biggest and most critical miss of the whole process is not having the data a paper is based on published along with the paper. If something is irreproducible, is it really scientific? If I don't have your data, can I really reproduce your results?

robotresearcher 9y ago
If you can’t, the results are invalid. I can give you data that say anything. The reproduction that counts is where you obtain similar data independently. If you want to validate that my claims are justified BY MY DATA then you need my data. If you want to validate that my claims are justified by the universe, you need to get your own data and should avoid being polluted by mine. Having said that, I competely support publishing data by default. But not for the reason you state.

scythe 9y ago

As an employee at an open access publisher, I can't agree that funding the peer review process is the biggest problem. Our surveys of our own reviewers have shown that only a small (<20%) minority of reviewers wish to be paid a fee for their reviews. The majority of referees prefer the current model of crediting volunteer reviewers in a regularly published "acknowledgements" article. I assume the incentive may be that reviewers show these to their tenure committee. In fact the most common complaint from peer reviewers is about the length of the review period. Because open-access journals have authors as our customers, the market pressure is to provide excellent customer service, and authors prefer publishers who will process their papers quickly. This pressure is passed on to reviewers who must complete reviews much faster than the old norms under Springer.

hyperbovine 9y ago

> resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals I think you may be unfamiliar with how the reviewing process works. I get an e-mail asking me to review an article for a journal. If I say yes, I donate between two and ten unpaid hours of my time producing a review. After I am done with my review, I send it to the AE. The associate editor donates additional hours of his/her time reading my review, plus one or two others, along with potentially the entire manuscript, in order make a decision on the paper. This recommendation gets forwarded to the editor, who makes the final call on publication. With few exceptions (the only ones I'm aware of being the biggies like Nature, Science and Cell) every single person involved in this process is uncompensated. In some cases the editor may receive a small honorarium, but it's trifling compared to amount of time it takes to run a large, prestigious journal. You're absolutely correct that reviewing is a resource intensive process. But you're wrong if you believe that the publishers are shouldering a significant part of the resource burden. This is exactly why people are so pissed off when these same publishers turn around and charge our own campus libraries a five-figure sum to access the same journals that we work basically for free to produce.

agjacobson 9y ago

Funding, or a startup enterprise, is certainly needed to administer the peer review process. I'm willing to bet it would be less than $10 per paper in universal use. No money is needed to pay reviewers. In fact the savings would be so great, their could be a courtesy payment. The ruinous censorship and false ownership of the publishers should be broken.