11 ms·

I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist. Top universities should just found a non-profit, per subject, with a

I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist. Top universities should just found a non-profit, per subject, with a single paid facilitator and a single paid editor (per journal) to find peer reviewers and edit the papers into a monthly journal. Modern tech has made it ridiculously easy to type, edit and publish such a thing if the inputs are LaTeX, Word, Markdown files or a Google Doc. And if you want it printed, there are shops that can do that for you for a small fee as well. This should be 100% open access to everyone, extremely cheap and could be 100% funded by those who are still willing to pay for paper versions or by tiny contributions from the top 100 universities.

supernova87a 6y ago
Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism. A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige? But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more. It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.
- chrispeel 6y ago
  > One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? I've been a reviewer and editor for various IEEE and other engineering publications and have never been paid. Of course funding for editors is helpful, yet it may be like open source where some are willing to put in work for free.
- underdeserver 6y ago
  > Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism. No they don't. Their editors do, not the entire organization, and really it's the selected (volunteer) peer reviewers who do. > A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. Agreed. > One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? That's why I think universities should be the founders. The top professors in a certain field can nominate a good editor, who will be paid full-time. > There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige? Prestige comes from being relevant and innovative. Also, who said this has to be a new journal? Why not convert an established on?
  - MrGunn 6y ago
    The majority (70% or so) of submissions are desk-rejected without even being sent for review, and the ability to do that well is something that's learned over time with extensive detailed knowledge of the particular field served by the journal. Note that there are more kinds of editors than just academic editors, too, even at places like PLOS & eLife.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  > Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism. I generally agree with you here > A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? But the editors in the majority of journals are already volunteers. They might get some minor amount of money for their work (we are typically talking maybe $100 a month max), but that's it. The only journals that have full time editors are the highest impact journals like nature and science, but it shows again and again that they are not really domain experts and are not necessarily acting in the interest of science. I actually have heard a nature editor say "our business is to sell journals, not to publish the best science". >There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige? Well if the big universities and funding agencies would push, this would happen quite fast. > But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more. > It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.
- brownbat 6y ago
  > "A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied." Establishing reputation is the central challenge for a lot of the internet. Sorting spam from mail, sorting useful search results from SEO, sorting legit programs from malware on app stores. "Let's just have a small handful of people manually review everything" is not a terrible first approach! It is the naive solution, and will work if you don't have to scale. It even worked for search for a couple years. And you might argue that it's ok for journals to keep doing that because they don't have to scale. They don't have to review, rate, and publish everything good. They can have a very, very tiny output and it's ok. But there is some cost to rate limiting scientific output. So I'm surprised there hasn't at least been a good competitor incorporating what we've learned from other domains. It wouldn't be the same, but at least trying to use some things like citation counts and reader behavior for an initial guess at what deserves review. All the arguments that "we need a small group of professionals curating these" lose a little weight in a replication crisis. If you really wanted to try this, you might want to go after low hanging fruit. Someone should make a nutritional science journal, using purely algorithmic data to score proposals. Not much to lose there. https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-choc...
- nerdponx 6y ago
  A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. How does this follow? "Open" doesn't mean "anyone can publish", it means "anyone can read". Funding for editors and webhosting should come from the universities themselves. Replace Elsevier with a nonprofit consortium funded directly by universities, and a lot of these problems just go away.
Vinnl 6y ago
Then you'll have replaced the problem of making research results actually available somewhere. But what it doesn't solve, is the problems of a) deciding what research to read and b) deciding which researchers to hire. Note that the current system, which relies on the brand name of the journals in which works (or an author's works) are published, is very flawed, but it's what people use, and is therefore what's making people refrain from actually publishing in those journals the universities would found. (Disclosure: I volunteer for https://plaudit.pub https://plaudit.pub, a project that aims to contribute to solving the mentioned problems to enable transitioning to Open Access journals.)
- sitkack 6y ago
  I love the idea of plaudit, it wold be interesting to tie into dlbp or semanticscholar. As it is now, I have to see if a researcher tweets paper recommendations. Are you working with either? I am sure you are aware, posting for the wider audience. Availability is the hard part, formats, indexing, a handle so that it can be referenced. We already have an awesome model for this with the e-print archives [2..=4]. As for what to read, this is what overlay journals are for! [1]. By splitting the mechanics of submission, serving, basic vetting, etc. any other group of people can create as many overlay journals as they deem necessary. Sorting, ranking and clustering of the research now is not coupled to getting the knowledge recorded. This excellent article [5] linked from the wikipedia entry has the perfect description of the concept, >>> The Open Journal of Astrophysics works in tandem with manuscripts posted on the pre-print server arXiv. Researchers submit their papers from arXiv directly to the journal, which evaluates them by conventional peer review. Accepted versions of the papers are then re-posted to arXiv and assigned a DOI, and the journal publishes links to them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal [2] https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/ [3] https://www.biorxiv.org/ https://www.biorxiv.org/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Eprint_archives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Eprint_archives [5] https://www.nature.com/news/open-journals-that-piggyback-on-arxiv-gather-momentum-1.19102 https://www.nature.com/news/open-journals-that-piggyback-on-...
  - Vinnl 6y ago
abhv 6y ago
I'm an academic. For years, my academic niche has tried to break free from the likes of Springer/Elsevier. Here are the bottlenecks: * There are wonderful "pre-print" servers like arxiv and eprint.iacr.org. However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? How to guarantee that these documents are available 75 years from now? I'm sure that many of you can devise solutions to this, but they will be costly, and they will need constant labor to implement. How do you pay for this? It is OK when 20,000 researchers in a field are downloading papers every once in a while, but what happens when every student in the world wants to read these? The bandwidth charge becomes non-trivial. It seems like it needs to be outsourced, and some commercial entity with experience handles it. * The tenure process is slow to change. Many academics need publications in prestigious journals with "high impact factors" in order to get tenure because the upper-level tenure committees in older institutions use these metrics to evaluate cases. These people are not stupid: it is just hard to evaluate cases across a university when you are not an expert. Instead, you assume that certain journals represent "the highest quality work" and thus use the presence of those publications to judge researchers. This means that the top papers still end up in Elsevier/Springer journals. When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away. I wonder how it is going to work now that Elsevier's catalog won't work this way...
- huhtenberg 6y ago
  > But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? Trusted timestamping. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt It also happens to be very widely deployed and supported by well-established companies, because it's an integral part of executable cross-signing. That is, this exists right now.
  - malikNF 6y ago
    Wouldn't saving the hash of the document on some blockchain be a more simpler solution to proving the integrity of a document?
pfortuny 6y ago
Oh dear, the burden of organizing peer-review and of consolidating some sort of "quality" stamp (I said "some sort of") is much more expensive than "nothing". I am not pro-Elsevier, I am just stating a fact.
- meej 6y ago
  And yet much of the work of peer review is done on a volunteer basis.
  - pfortuny 6y ago
    Organizing it and providing the "quality stamp" is what I was referring to.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      > Organizing it and providing the "quality stamp" is what I was referring to. Lol that's also done by volunteers.
- underdeserver 6y ago
  OK, maybe I exaggerated when I said nothing. Per subject, per journal, the same person who edits a journal today at Elsevier could do the same thing for the same salary at a university consortium-backed non-profit.
  - pfortuny 6y ago
    Yes, per subject per journal but then how many non-profits do you need? How do you organize them? How do you get a coordinated best-effort, etc... I mean: corporations do not exist in a vacuum, they (usually) DO provide benefits to the society also. I insist: I am not trying to defend abuses, I am trying to clarify that a for-profit corporation dealing with those many editorial issues is not bad per se.
- foepys 6y ago
  The only people getting paid in the reviewing process are the journals that are only coordinating the reviews. Actual reviewers (aka other researchers in the same field as the paper) are working for free.
mihaaly 6y ago
I believe peer review should be supplemented or even replaced by social review methods where not only arbitrary reviewers but the whole scientific community might have chance judging, discussing and commenting any paper. Online. The logic and safeguards may not be that easy to create in the first place but in my opinion it would worth the effort eventually!
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  You can already judge, discuss and comment on any paper you want - create a blog and do it.
  - mihaaly 6y ago
    Hm, perhaps the HN should be closed as well and everyone should have their own blog instead?... or ask the peer reviewers to discuss and judge papers on their blogs instead?
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      Not sure what you mean, sorry? When a conference chooses which papers to accept, that's them accepting the paper. If you don't want to accept the paper then you don't have to, but yes you don't get a right to veto some other conference doing it.
      - mihaaly 6y ago
        But you are aware of journal articles as well, dont't you? And how standardized and comprehensive the peer selection is? (it is not, in general, with huge variations)
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        > But you are aware of journal articles as well, dont't you? Yes. > And how standardized and comprehensive the peer selection is? (it is not, in general, with huge variations) Yes. So what? My point was you can accept whatever papers you want. You can't make or stop someone else accepting. Seems like a fine situation to me? Anyone can recognise the papers they want to.
beamatronic 6y ago
Why does MIT pay anyone for software?
specialist 6y ago
"Top universities should just [fund]..." I want something more crazy, daring. Kickstarter, meets blogging, meets X-Prizes, meets startup incubator, meets moon-shots, meets those McArthur genius grants, meets Y-Combinator classes (cohorts?). Start with a fund. Recruit some lunatics, err, mavericks, err, battle weary scientists to judge proposals. Make a couple lofty problem statements. Maybe one per year. "Create next generation peer review system." "Invent open access research thingamajig." "Launch competitive journals for emerging disciplines." "Deploy FOSS collaborative content management system for science reporting." Define some semi-plausible victory conditions. Number of papers refereed. Number of research projects hosted. Number of citations. Each applicant does a pitch. Fund a reasonable number for groups each round. Beer and pizza. Wet, lather, rinse, repeat.
a1369209993 6y ago
> I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist. I suspect you're being rhetorical here, but just in case: your premise is wrong; they don't need to exist, in fact they need to not exist; preferably they need to die in a fire.
alasdair_ 6y ago
>I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist. I'm going to guess they exist because, despite decrying these companies, scientists still want to snag that spot in Nature for the same reason that writing a front-page New York Times article is considered a bigger deal than publishing the same story on your blog, even if the content is identical.
occamrazor 6y ago
Elsevier is a for-profit publisher, but JSTOR is a non-profit University consortium.

supernova87a 6y ago

Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism. A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige? But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more. It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.

chrispeel 6y ago
> One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? I've been a reviewer and editor for various IEEE and other engineering publications and have never been paid. Of course funding for editors is helpful, yet it may be like open source where some are willing to put in work for free.
underdeserver 6y ago
> Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism. No they don't. Their editors do, not the entire organization, and really it's the selected (volunteer) peer reviewers who do. > A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. Agreed. > One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? That's why I think universities should be the founders. The top professors in a certain field can nominate a good editor, who will be paid full-time. > There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige? Prestige comes from being relevant and innovative. Also, who said this has to be a new journal? Why not convert an established on?
- MrGunn 6y ago
  The majority (70% or so) of submissions are desk-rejected without even being sent for review, and the ability to do that well is something that's learned over time with extensive detailed knowledge of the particular field served by the journal. Note that there are more kinds of editors than just academic editors, too, even at places like PLOS & eLife.
cycomanic 6y ago
> Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism. I generally agree with you here > A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? But the editors in the majority of journals are already volunteers. They might get some minor amount of money for their work (we are typically talking maybe $100 a month max), but that's it. The only journals that have full time editors are the highest impact journals like nature and science, but it shows again and again that they are not really domain experts and are not necessarily acting in the interest of science. I actually have heard a nature editor say "our business is to sell journals, not to publish the best science". >There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige? Well if the big universities and funding agencies would push, this would happen quite fast. > But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more. > It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.
brownbat 6y ago
> "A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied." Establishing reputation is the central challenge for a lot of the internet. Sorting spam from mail, sorting useful search results from SEO, sorting legit programs from malware on app stores. "Let's just have a small handful of people manually review everything" is not a terrible first approach! It is the naive solution, and will work if you don't have to scale. It even worked for search for a couple years. And you might argue that it's ok for journals to keep doing that because they don't have to scale. They don't have to review, rate, and publish everything good. They can have a very, very tiny output and it's ok. But there is some cost to rate limiting scientific output. So I'm surprised there hasn't at least been a good competitor incorporating what we've learned from other domains. It wouldn't be the same, but at least trying to use some things like citation counts and reader behavior for an initial guess at what deserves review. All the arguments that "we need a small group of professionals curating these" lose a little weight in a replication crisis. If you really wanted to try this, you might want to go after low hanging fruit. Someone should make a nutritional science journal, using purely algorithmic data to score proposals. Not much to lose there. https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-choc...
nerdponx 6y ago
A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. How does this follow? "Open" doesn't mean "anyone can publish", it means "anyone can read". Funding for editors and webhosting should come from the universities themselves. Replace Elsevier with a nonprofit consortium funded directly by universities, and a lot of these problems just go away.

Vinnl 6y ago

Then you'll have replaced the problem of making research results actually available somewhere. But what it doesn't solve, is the problems of a) deciding what research to read and b) deciding which researchers to hire. Note that the current system, which relies on the brand name of the journals in which works (or an author's works) are published, is very flawed, but it's what people use, and is therefore what's making people refrain from actually publishing in those journals the universities would found. (Disclosure: I volunteer for https://plaudit.pub https://plaudit.pub, a project that aims to contribute to solving the mentioned problems to enable transitioning to Open Access journals.)

sitkack 6y ago
I love the idea of plaudit, it wold be interesting to tie into dlbp or semanticscholar. As it is now, I have to see if a researcher tweets paper recommendations. Are you working with either? I am sure you are aware, posting for the wider audience. Availability is the hard part, formats, indexing, a handle so that it can be referenced. We already have an awesome model for this with the e-print archives [2..=4]. As for what to read, this is what overlay journals are for! [1]. By splitting the mechanics of submission, serving, basic vetting, etc. any other group of people can create as many overlay journals as they deem necessary. Sorting, ranking and clustering of the research now is not coupled to getting the knowledge recorded. This excellent article [5] linked from the wikipedia entry has the perfect description of the concept, >>> The Open Journal of Astrophysics works in tandem with manuscripts posted on the pre-print server arXiv. Researchers submit their papers from arXiv directly to the journal, which evaluates them by conventional peer review. Accepted versions of the papers are then re-posted to arXiv and assigned a DOI, and the journal publishes links to them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal [2] https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/ [3] https://www.biorxiv.org/ https://www.biorxiv.org/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Eprint_archives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Eprint_archives [5] https://www.nature.com/news/open-journals-that-piggyback-on-arxiv-gather-momentum-1.19102 https://www.nature.com/news/open-journals-that-piggyback-on-...
- Vinnl 6y ago

abhv 6y ago

I'm an academic. For years, my academic niche has tried to break free from the likes of Springer/Elsevier. Here are the bottlenecks: * There are wonderful "pre-print" servers like arxiv and eprint.iacr.org. However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? How to guarantee that these documents are available 75 years from now? I'm sure that many of you can devise solutions to this, but they will be costly, and they will need constant labor to implement. How do you pay for this? It is OK when 20,000 researchers in a field are downloading papers every once in a while, but what happens when every student in the world wants to read these? The bandwidth charge becomes non-trivial. It seems like it needs to be outsourced, and some commercial entity with experience handles it. * The tenure process is slow to change. Many academics need publications in prestigious journals with "high impact factors" in order to get tenure because the upper-level tenure committees in older institutions use these metrics to evaluate cases. These people are not stupid: it is just hard to evaluate cases across a university when you are not an expert. Instead, you assume that certain journals represent "the highest quality work" and thus use the presence of those publications to judge researchers. This means that the top papers still end up in Elsevier/Springer journals. When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away. I wonder how it is going to work now that Elsevier's catalog won't work this way...

huhtenberg 6y ago
> But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? Trusted timestamping. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt It also happens to be very widely deployed and supported by well-established companies, because it's an integral part of executable cross-signing. That is, this exists right now.
- malikNF 6y ago
  Wouldn't saving the hash of the document on some blockchain be a more simpler solution to proving the integrity of a document?

pfortuny 6y ago

Oh dear, the burden of organizing peer-review and of consolidating some sort of "quality" stamp (I said "some sort of") is much more expensive than "nothing". I am not pro-Elsevier, I am just stating a fact.

meej 6y ago
And yet much of the work of peer review is done on a volunteer basis.
- pfortuny 6y ago
  Organizing it and providing the "quality stamp" is what I was referring to.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > Organizing it and providing the "quality stamp" is what I was referring to. Lol that's also done by volunteers.
underdeserver 6y ago
OK, maybe I exaggerated when I said nothing. Per subject, per journal, the same person who edits a journal today at Elsevier could do the same thing for the same salary at a university consortium-backed non-profit.
- pfortuny 6y ago
  Yes, per subject per journal but then how many non-profits do you need? How do you organize them? How do you get a coordinated best-effort, etc... I mean: corporations do not exist in a vacuum, they (usually) DO provide benefits to the society also. I insist: I am not trying to defend abuses, I am trying to clarify that a for-profit corporation dealing with those many editorial issues is not bad per se.
foepys 6y ago
The only people getting paid in the reviewing process are the journals that are only coordinating the reviews. Actual reviewers (aka other researchers in the same field as the paper) are working for free.

mihaaly 6y ago

I believe peer review should be supplemented or even replaced by social review methods where not only arbitrary reviewers but the whole scientific community might have chance judging, discussing and commenting any paper. Online. The logic and safeguards may not be that easy to create in the first place but in my opinion it would worth the effort eventually!

chrisseaton 6y ago
You can already judge, discuss and comment on any paper you want - create a blog and do it.
- mihaaly 6y ago
  Hm, perhaps the HN should be closed as well and everyone should have their own blog instead?... or ask the peer reviewers to discuss and judge papers on their blogs instead?
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Not sure what you mean, sorry? When a conference chooses which papers to accept, that's them accepting the paper. If you don't want to accept the paper then you don't have to, but yes you don't get a right to veto some other conference doing it.
    - mihaaly 6y ago
      But you are aware of journal articles as well, dont't you? And how standardized and comprehensive the peer selection is? (it is not, in general, with huge variations)
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        > But you are aware of journal articles as well, dont't you? Yes. > And how standardized and comprehensive the peer selection is? (it is not, in general, with huge variations) Yes. So what? My point was you can accept whatever papers you want. You can't make or stop someone else accepting. Seems like a fine situation to me? Anyone can recognise the papers they want to.

beamatronic 6y ago

Why does MIT pay anyone for software?

specialist 6y ago

"Top universities should just [fund]..." I want something more crazy, daring. Kickstarter, meets blogging, meets X-Prizes, meets startup incubator, meets moon-shots, meets those McArthur genius grants, meets Y-Combinator classes (cohorts?). Start with a fund. Recruit some lunatics, err, mavericks, err, battle weary scientists to judge proposals. Make a couple lofty problem statements. Maybe one per year. "Create next generation peer review system." "Invent open access research thingamajig." "Launch competitive journals for emerging disciplines." "Deploy FOSS collaborative content management system for science reporting." Define some semi-plausible victory conditions. Number of papers refereed. Number of research projects hosted. Number of citations. Each applicant does a pitch. Fund a reasonable number for groups each round. Beer and pizza. Wet, lather, rinse, repeat.

a1369209993 6y ago

> I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist. I suspect you're being rhetorical here, but just in case: your premise is wrong; they don't need to exist, in fact they need to not exist; preferably they need to die in a fire.

alasdair_ 6y ago

>I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist. I'm going to guess they exist because, despite decrying these companies, scientists still want to snag that spot in Nature for the same reason that writing a front-page New York Times article is considered a bigger deal than publishing the same story on your blog, even if the content is identical.

occamrazor 6y ago

Elsevier is a for-profit publisher, but JSTOR is a non-profit University consortium.