"Disrupt[ing] the scientific journal industry" is a massively ambitious goal. Good luck! I'd really like to know more about startups that are trying a less am

"Disrupt[ing] the scientific journal industry" is a massively ambitious goal. Good luck! I'd really like to know more about startups that are trying a less ambitious first step; something like "wordpress for marine biologists who want to start an open-access journal" or "reddit for geneticists." The issues in different disciplines seem different enough that intimate domain knowledge is almost mandatory and something that starts with the idea "I want to talk to these people about this subject in this way" could work out better than "kill the journals." Since it's fun to quote PG: > The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. [1] I guess, "I want to read other people's research for free" counts as a problem, but I'd actually be surprised if it were literally a problem that the founders of this startup (and the others mentioned in the article) were facing. I mention this in a comment below [2], but Economics is extremely open by a lot of standards (maybe because of the policy-relevance of a lot of the research, but that's speculation on my part). There is a large blogging community that includes very accomplished researchers, most working papers are available online well before publication (and will typically reflect at least one round of referee comments), there are comprehensive citation-based rankings, etc. Anyone interested in this stuff should check out http://repec.org http://repec.org; the html is dated, but it seems like an established unwalled-garden version of what this article, and others, describe (one that uses email and rss feeds rather than direct-messages and social-network-type friends; decide for yourself which you prefer). Economists still publish any important research in peer-reviewed publications, and most of them are closed-access. So I find it unlikely that just the right infrastructure and "metrics" are going to kill peer-reviewed publication. I think it's possible that some set of tools could kill the crappy scientific journals in one or two fields and certainly could kill all of the crappy closed-access journals in those fields, and then iterations and incremental improvements could lead to something that worked across fields and worked for higher-quality publications. [1] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5160633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5160633