Something like this is long overdue, I think. Great work. Open academic publication models have had a difficult time for a number of reasons, but systems like

Something like this is long overdue, I think. Great work. Open academic publication models have had a difficult time for a number of reasons, but systems like this are very helpful in making the case for openness. One thing that always bothers me with a purely Reddit-style, point-based system for surfacing academic discussions across domains, though, is that it's unclear what kind of papers are being surfaced: a very good paper in a very niche space may not get the attention that a mediocre paper written for a mass audience (for some definition of "mass") would. Is that an acceptable drawback for openjournal? Or should there be some way for niche papers to gain exposure? Forking openjournal and making your own "sub-openjournal" for your research domain? Weighted voting mechanisms? Also, like reddit, it might be useful to have a mechanism to demonstrate, emphasize, and/or sort by specific commenters' backgrounds, training, and credentials. For many domains, peer review and commentary from people in the same field might be more useful than general commentary. As a minor wish, I've always wanted to see a mechanism for encouraging sharing of implementations, test code, and other raw experimental results along with the actual papers. 'Cause really, for most cases, I'm not going to implement a multi-page algorithm just to verify a conclusion or make use of an insight. But if I can fork and compile a github repo associated with the paper...