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It's not just that the platform needs to be considered credible; it's that they're used as a proxy for the relative quality of academic research. So an article
by Vinnl 7y ago
It's not just that the platform needs to be considered credible; it's that they're used as a proxy for the relative quality of academic research. So an article in Nature is considered "better" than an article in Humbug's Best Journal.
Generally, I think the better idea would be to unlink evaluation from publication - so researchers can publish their articles wherever, and separate from that, reputable colleagues endorse their works (or not). In the end, journals derive their credibility from the reputations of their peer reviewers and editors, so that is a way to cut out the middle man.
The challenge, of course, is getting researchers to actually do that.
(Disclaimer: I'm part of a project that does exactly that.)
- rsfern 7y agoI really like the idea of unlinking publication from evaluation. Especially in CS people cite arxiv preprints all the time since the field moves so fast. I do this in my own work as well, but most of my field does not publish preprints on arxiv. Without real infrastructure, we’re all de facto relying on google scholar to sort all these things out. I’m starting to think that open and signed reviews would go a long way towards moving from review as a gatekeeping mechanism to a means of improving the overall quality and accessibility of the scientific discourse. What is the project you’re involved in?
- Vinnl 7y agoIt's called Plaudit.pub [1] and launched not too long ago. The aim is for preprint servers (and eventually journals) to display endorsements right next to the research they host, but more most of them, this currently requires a browser extension. Also note that it currently only provides a solution for the endorsement part of evaluation - you'd still have to use, say, email or a comment form to provide actual feedback. [1] https://plaudit.pub/ https://plaudit.pub/