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I love the idea, but bootstrapping is the real tricky bit with a site like this. Putting aside the grant funding idea, I think you could really democratize aca
by BruceIV 12y ago
I love the idea, but bootstrapping is the real tricky bit with a site like this.
Putting aside the grant funding idea, I think you could really democratize academic publishing by adding a StackExchange-like rating system to something like ArXiv, and also building in a conference organization system (this part is actually key). You'd allow researchers to link off-site (even paywalled) content to their profiles (email to the address listed in the author list should be sufficient authentication), and bootstrap the rating system by granting reputation points in certain subfields to authors with recent publications in reputable conferences/journals. You get reputation by people who already have it positively reviewing your papers. The system gets papers by including a really good conference organization system (in-person networking is still very worthwhile, even if we solve the journal problems of distribution and peer review), which requires conference submissions to be put into the system, along with the reviewers comments. You'd fund the thing (and weed out junk submissions) by imposing a relatively nominal fee (say $50) for lifetime hosting.
Such a system is technically possible, but it would need to achieve critical mass to actually replace the existing journal system.
(I should mention I'm coming at this from the perspective of a computer science researcher - in a lot of the subfields of CS the most expensive parts of doing research are 1) your time and 2) institutional library access to get at the papers you need (Google Scholar helps here, but it's far from perfect), so large grants are less essential than in disciplines that need expensive laboratory equipment or travel to exotic locations.)
- chrismonsanto 12y ago> 2) institutional library access to get at the papers you need (Google Scholar helps here, but it's far from perfect) Really? At least in my fields (programming languages, networking) everyone has their articles on their homepage. You can find whatever you need by using regular Google or CiteSeer.
- thaumasiotes 12y agoIt turns out that this is very particular to the field. CS and math papers are easily available, but I was pretty shocked when I found an interesting cite to a linguistics paper on wikipedia, went to look it up, and discovered that there was no way for me to read the paper. :/ In related news, the arXiv model of making paper preprints available has great difficulty catching on in other fields because of fear among the scientists.
- yungchin 12y agoEven if you'd achieve critical mass, I think there's another problem. A fundamental difference with say StackOverflow, is that for a typical programming question there will be many people who, even if they don't know the answer, can distinguish a good from a bad answer. Most questions have a reasonably quickly verifiable answer, or they're about best practices. Scientific publishing on the other hand, should always be on the cutting edge, and has endless niches. If you judge that sort of work in StackExchange-style, in the best case an expert shows up (the guy who Cell editors would hopefully have invited for the peer review anyway) and gives you a subtle argument for/against, and almost nobody can vote it up/down because they lack the background to grasp the subtle detail. In the worst case, a Nobel Price winner shows up and leaves an off-the-cuff heuristic criticism, and everybody votes it up because well, hey. And it would look like the crowd sourcing worked... except that he totally missed the subtler points.
- BruceIV 12y agoFair; StackExchange might not be the best model. I'd say public reviews of papers, but not crowdsourced ratings of reviews - rank reviews by researcher reputation instead, weighting that reputation by reputation in a given subfield, and maybe with a weighting boost if the paper in question cites the researcher's work. Anecdotally, I've got a paper draft on ArXiv right now, which I sent to both the authors of the paper I based it on (who I got some really useful feedback from), and to a mailing list full of developers working on similar problems (who argued with me about typos my abstract didn't have) - this suggests that the people you cite might have better input into your paper than the general public.