3 ms·
Academics, I have a proposal/question and was curious if such a system would work for you. Here it goes: Take a P2P program similar to Kazaa or BitTorrent to
by eecc 8y ago
Academics, I have a proposal/question and was curious if such a system would work for you. Here it goes:
Take a P2P program similar to Kazaa or BitTorrent to share paper pdfs and datasets.
Next to these files also share indexes, derived data for searching.
Next to that, also share user generated review comments and endorsements to implement peer review and quality filtering.
Finally, digitally sign all these data to guarantee provenance and credibility of the data found on the network.
Let me know what you think of it. I’ve been loosely working on a prototype application that does all that for a while.
- sweezyjeezy 8y agoNot sure that user generated review comments are a good idea - it would be to hard to convince people (me included), that they'd be a good replacement for peer-review. You don't know the user's expertise, you have no guarantee that they have read the paper. Granted that last one is sometimes not true in real world publishing either - but at least the social pressure is there. It could also lead to gaming, asking your colleagues to give good reviews, or worse, companies that are paid to write good reviews, same as what has happened with Amazon etc. Academia is largely a social construct, that's why it's hard to replace with 100% technology.
- eecc 8y agoWell the UGC I was thinking of is like http://www.openannotation.org http://www.openannotation.org mainly used to link to other papers and/or comment of draft papers. Also simple “Reviewed” tags, and other classification items. Since any derived data would be signed and linked to the identity of its author a default filter removes anything that is not transitively included in your academic network. Reviewed articles would just be “review count > N and reviewers in fieldNet”
- ms013 8y agoThe problem isn’t technical. The current flaws in the publishing system are not due to lack of indexing, data distribution, provenance, or filtering. And please, please, please, don’t turn reviews into some user driven drivel like amazon product reviews or other systems that are easily gamed or prone to the whims of the masses. We already have problems with gaming and personal agendas making reviews less than impartial: don’t make something that makes it 10x worse. (CS academic publishing and refereeing for 20+ years here).
- eecc 8y agoI understand, please see clarifications in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18537122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18537122