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The issue is not a technical one. At the heart, it’s entirely about reputation and governance. Who is behind the open access effort and how they organise it is

The issue is not a technical one. At the heart, it’s entirely about reputation and governance. Who is behind the open access effort and how they organise it is more important for the credibility of the whole effort than how it’s technically done. I’m fairly sure that the technical costs are pretty much incidental here. It’s not like publishing was a particularly new endeavour.

j_maffe 2y ago
Exactly. Projects like these incorporate so much more than the technical infrastructure.
j-pb 2y ago
I disagree. You don't need organisations that assign hierarchical unique identifiers in the form of DOIs if you just identify papers based on their hash. You don't need publishers to verify identity via centrally assigned ORCIDs if every scientist can just sign their papers with their self generated public key. You don't need proof of publication at a specific time via a journal, if you have a bunch of publicly available nodes that can notarize your papers hash with a publication timestamp. You don't need peer review, if you establish a culture of rebuttal and confirmation papers that use the previous infrastructure to form a web of trust, where every scientist can see an individualy computed trustworthyness score for every paper that they read, based on the transitive trust of the peers that they personally deem trustworthy. You don't need long term archival at libraries and journals, when you have a decentralized distributed hash table, where public institutions and individuals can contribute storage space to store blobs of papers and scientific data, that can be retrieved by their hash. We think too small compared to what's possible. And we completely ignore the attack vectors that the current non-cryptographic identifiers, systems and institutions have. The issue is only a political one precisely because established players don't want to give up their power or even learn new ways.
- iangpmulvany 2y ago
  I had an interesting conversation this week with the folks behind https://biofactoid.org https://biofactoid.org, a service to allow researchers to openly make available the semantics behind pathways they study in their paper. Their service is working quite well at the moment because they hide all of the complexity from researchers. They told me that even using terminology like "database" or "identifier" reduces the likelihood of researchers completing the task. I say this because I think the idea that researchers will use a self generate public key won't work at the the scale of our scholarly ecosystem (roughly 5M papers peer reviewed papers published annually).
  - j-pb 2y ago
    You need to provide tools that abstract this away for users, like any good software, but passkeys are exactly that technology at work and currently gaining widespread adoption. If my mom gets a better user experience from passkeys than from passwords, then researchers will get a better user experience from passkeys than they will get from having authorizations and workflow for dozens of different publishers, including talking to librarians on the phone.
dbingham 2y ago
The problem is that ultimately, all those efforts are building software - whether open source or platforms. And few of them are building it very well. The user experience of the vast majority of these efforts is abysmal and it undermines whatever other credibility the organization might have. User experience matters. And for that, you need people who have experience building software with a high bar for user experience.

j_maffe 2y ago

Exactly. Projects like these incorporate so much more than the technical infrastructure.

j-pb 2y ago

I disagree. You don't need organisations that assign hierarchical unique identifiers in the form of DOIs if you just identify papers based on their hash. You don't need publishers to verify identity via centrally assigned ORCIDs if every scientist can just sign their papers with their self generated public key. You don't need proof of publication at a specific time via a journal, if you have a bunch of publicly available nodes that can notarize your papers hash with a publication timestamp. You don't need peer review, if you establish a culture of rebuttal and confirmation papers that use the previous infrastructure to form a web of trust, where every scientist can see an individualy computed trustworthyness score for every paper that they read, based on the transitive trust of the peers that they personally deem trustworthy. You don't need long term archival at libraries and journals, when you have a decentralized distributed hash table, where public institutions and individuals can contribute storage space to store blobs of papers and scientific data, that can be retrieved by their hash. We think too small compared to what's possible. And we completely ignore the attack vectors that the current non-cryptographic identifiers, systems and institutions have. The issue is only a political one precisely because established players don't want to give up their power or even learn new ways.

iangpmulvany 2y ago
I had an interesting conversation this week with the folks behind https://biofactoid.org https://biofactoid.org, a service to allow researchers to openly make available the semantics behind pathways they study in their paper. Their service is working quite well at the moment because they hide all of the complexity from researchers. They told me that even using terminology like "database" or "identifier" reduces the likelihood of researchers completing the task. I say this because I think the idea that researchers will use a self generate public key won't work at the the scale of our scholarly ecosystem (roughly 5M papers peer reviewed papers published annually).
- j-pb 2y ago
  You need to provide tools that abstract this away for users, like any good software, but passkeys are exactly that technology at work and currently gaining widespread adoption. If my mom gets a better user experience from passkeys than from passwords, then researchers will get a better user experience from passkeys than they will get from having authorizations and workflow for dozens of different publishers, including talking to librarians on the phone.

dbingham 2y ago

The problem is that ultimately, all those efforts are building software - whether open source or platforms. And few of them are building it very well. The user experience of the vast majority of these efforts is abysmal and it undermines whatever other credibility the organization might have. User experience matters. And for that, you need people who have experience building software with a high bar for user experience.