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> What counts as an error? I feel like, 'let the market decide.' is probably a reasonable answer here. Science is always an interest-directed endeavour, and w

> What counts as an error? I feel like, 'let the market decide.' is probably a reasonable answer here. Science is always an interest-directed endeavour, and we have these problems in conventional review anyway, they're just harder to provide a consistent definition of. I would be inclined to say that typos and grammar errors probably aren't worth paying for - but that's just me. If journals turn out to really care about those things, why not let them pay for them? Heck, if they know ahead of time that that's what they're interested in paying for, let them forward the paper to a grammar expert and get even more utility for the money. How much is each error worth, related to who pays. Well, make bounty funds and let each fund make its own choices. If a bunch of Christians really want to disprove evolution, let them put a massive bounty out on errors in biology papers. I imagine that such Christians wouldn't care much about typos or grammar mistakes, they might care more for citation errors, and a lot more for errors in maths or evidence. You pay for the truth that's important to you. And if the person paying disagrees with the person making the claim, then the person making the claim presumably doesn't get paid. But if you keep doing that, then you damage your ability to buy truths that are important to you. Which is ultimately self-destructive. Bug bounties spring to mind as an example there. If the Christian fund never pays out, people will just stop working with the Christian fund. And that's a decent signalling mechanism it seems to me. If people claim to value the truth in some area, but they never pay out and no-one wants to work with them... then it's probably a decent bet that they don't really. After all, they won't pay for it. One potential problem there, I suppose, is ignorant people putting out a bounty on something and ending up paying out a lot of money for errors that aren't actually errors. Because they don't know enough to judge for themselves. But in so far as you have a motivation to avoid paying for lies, you'd then have a motivation to hire people who knew more about the subject than you to vet them - which isn't a bad thing. I mean if you didn't know enough to assess the thing in the first place, all this does is provide a reason for you to be cautious about pretending to know things you don't.

dalke 13y ago
My feeling is that your proposal makes no economic sense. What's the market? How big is that market compared to the external market? People pay to have their articles published. The price ranges between $100 and $1,500. As a reward, people get prestige and career advancement. Others journals a free to publish, but the readers pay an access fee. In any case, in most cases the publication fee is much smaller than the time and effort needed to write a paper. So a pittance fee - even $100 for all error corrections per paper - isn't enough to change that overall market. You need to have serious money to make a difference. If someone has evidence which, say, shows rabbits and velociraptors co-existed, then it's more cost effective to publish that paper in its own right. I can't figure out why another publication/error correction system would be more effective. Consider also that many research fields are very small. The next person to understand the paper well enough to correct it might not come around for 10 years. Market-based solutions don't work well on long timescales like that.

dalke 13y ago

My feeling is that your proposal makes no economic sense. What's the market? How big is that market compared to the external market? People pay to have their articles published. The price ranges between $100 and $1,500. As a reward, people get prestige and career advancement. Others journals a free to publish, but the readers pay an access fee. In any case, in most cases the publication fee is much smaller than the time and effort needed to write a paper. So a pittance fee - even $100 for all error corrections per paper - isn't enough to change that overall market. You need to have serious money to make a difference. If someone has evidence which, say, shows rabbits and velociraptors co-existed, then it's more cost effective to publish that paper in its own right. I can't figure out why another publication/error correction system would be more effective. Consider also that many research fields are very small. The next person to understand the paper well enough to correct it might not come around for 10 years. Market-based solutions don't work well on long timescales like that.