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Peer reviewers are unpaid, curation seems like a problem the internet can solve well, and trust... deriving one's trust from Elsevier or Springer is not great m
by vibrio 3y ago
Peer reviewers are unpaid, curation seems like a problem the internet can solve well, and trust... deriving one's trust from Elsevier or Springer is not great model. Granted, funding is needed to ensure distribution, but multiple billions of dollars in revenue (and even profit) seems excessive for what they provide.
- globular-toast 3y ago> Peer reviewers are unpaid Is that bad? How would they get paid if all articles were free? > curation seems like a problem the internet can solve well "The internet" isn't anything more than a (supposedly) robust telecommunications network. Anyone can curate anything, but that is meaningless without trust. > deriving one's trust from Elsevier or Springer is not great model Any centralised trust model is broken by default. We've had practical web of trust security for decades at this point. But for various reasons nobody will use it. It would be perfect for things like this.
- vibrio 3y agoI think we agree that the current system isn't good. In posting, I was working out my thoughts on the P&L for those intermediaries, and the value they provide versus the value they extract. I'm not sure what things should look like, but my conclusion is that selling publicly funded science to publicly funded scientists at a premium seems like quite an inefficiency.