2 ms·

Show HN: Endorsements for Open Access Research

2 points by Vinnl 8y ago

Vinnl 8y ago
Hi HN, I feel I should add some additional Bigger Picture context here. You might have seen me show up here on Hacker News whenever Open Access gets discussed. I feel strongly about free access to publicly funded research, and Plaudit is where I'm contributing to making a transition to Open Access happen. The key problem we're trying to solve is that researchers feel pressured to publish in "reputable", but often paywalled, journals. After all, it's still the case that being able to say you've been published in Nature is often a huge career boost. The way we're trying to solve that is by removing the journal indirection. Rather than the journal's name being a stamp of approval signifying that trusted researchers have looked at and approved of a work, those researchers can indicate that approval directly - without delaying or preventing the work's publication. It should be noted that this extension is not the primary method with which we hope to collect these endorsements. Rather, the goal is to have an endorsement widget integrated directly by publishers of academic research. This pilot is currently supported by eLife Innovation [1] and the Center for Open Science [2], and I'm working with a few preprint servers to help them integrate it. That said, I wanted to allow individuals to contribute as well. This extension will inject the widget into the websites of a few explicitly supported academic publishers. Additionally, it will add a toolbar icon to most websites that host scholarly research, allowing you to endorse that research as well. Endorsements added through the extension will be useful to other users of the extension, but more importantly they will add incentive for publishers to incorporate the widget into their website, thus exposing those endorsements. Good to know: all this is not for profit, open source, and endorsement data is made available openly as well. I will be hanging around to answer any questions and read all remarks and suggestions you might have, so fire away. [1] https://elifesciences.org/labs https://elifesciences.org/labs [2] https://cos.io/ https://cos.io/

2 points by Vinnl 8y ago

Hi HN, I feel I should add some additional Bigger Picture context here. You might have seen me show up here on Hacker News whenever Open Access gets discussed. I feel strongly about free access to publicly funded research, and Plaudit is where I'm contributing to making a transition to Open Access happen. The key problem we're trying to solve is that researchers feel pressured to publish in "reputable", but often paywalled, journals. After all, it's still the case that being able to say you've been published in Nature is often a huge career boost. The way we're trying to solve that is by removing the journal indirection. Rather than the journal's name being a stamp of approval signifying that trusted researchers have looked at and approved of a work, those researchers can indicate that approval directly - without delaying or preventing the work's publication. It should be noted that this extension is not the primary method with which we hope to collect these endorsements. Rather, the goal is to have an endorsement widget integrated directly by publishers of academic research. This pilot is currently supported by eLife Innovation [1] and the Center for Open Science [2], and I'm working with a few preprint servers to help them integrate it. That said, I wanted to allow individuals to contribute as well. This extension will inject the widget into the websites of a few explicitly supported academic publishers. Additionally, it will add a toolbar icon to most websites that host scholarly research, allowing you to endorse that research as well. Endorsements added through the extension will be useful to other users of the extension, but more importantly they will add incentive for publishers to incorporate the widget into their website, thus exposing those endorsements. Good to know: all this is not for profit, open source, and endorsement data is made available openly as well. I will be hanging around to answer any questions and read all remarks and suggestions you might have, so fire away. [1] https://elifesciences.org/labs https://elifesciences.org/labs [2] https://cos.io/ https://cos.io/