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If you have any experience in this field, please include so in your reply. I’ve
seen over time a lot of criticism over the peer review process and how journals
hyper-exploit academics simply because the journals are able to monetize
scarcity/exclusivity. I saw another post on it today and I thought, “what if
this was federated?” I was looking around and I see that there are writing
portions of the process, such as pubpub or manubot that essentially use git and
markdown - but that’s not the main point as that’s on the before end. What about
on the review process? Let’s say there’s software that’s federated and can be
run by anyone from individuals to universities and consortiums. When a user or
team is ready to publish, they can “submit their work” for publishing, which
would federate out as works pending publication. This part’s a different issue:
how to handle reputation for who can review, but I think there are ways to do
that and that’s beyond the scope of this post as I imagine it could get pretty
complicated and would require feedback from people actually in the industry. The
reviewers can submit comments and reviews back to the author via federation, but
this time the process can be open instead of behind closed doors. The authors
revise, comment, etc. At some point a determination is made that this work is
“published.” This seems like a feasible premise. Just brainstorming, you would
get history, open reviews, no one asking $1,000 to submit a publication that
they then make bank on while you get scraps or nothing. I could see a reputation
system within a given field and/or overall, with certain users being “review
board” or “reviewers” on their instance. There could also be additional
reputation if, say, a group of universities creates consortiums for different
fields and then that consortium “publishes” a work. There’d have to be
additional process to block people from spamming works that aren’t ready or
whatever, but that’s not really the point for now. Am I barking up the wrong
tree here? At first thought, it seems like there are ways to allow federation of
research papers and peer review and to put a dent in the grip of technical
journals.
the current problem with journals is that there is no money in it for authors. journals oly exist because of historical reasons, and older folks still value them.
Arxiv exists as a semi journal, which is some what cc4 (or some other cc of your choice) and that is great, but still one source.
You can just host your research papers as websites, as in just a web article, and use some vcs like github, codeberg, or self hosted forego system. That is arguably the best case.
I have a paper which is on arxiv, and my supervisor has been “polishing” it for a journal, but to me that is a useless process, because i almost never care about things like journal impact factor or h index. to me, the only thing valide is steps for reproducibility, that is, give me a recipe, and if i can recreate, then you did a great job. This could mean, for example, releasing all your raw unprocessed data.
one of the reasons reviewers are effective is that the remain anonymous, that is why they can shit talk a lot. You would not have the slander, if you make the identity real.
I think we should not have reputation or verification, as i stated above, if you post on your own website, and not have gatekeeping. Yes a lot of the work may not meet “some standards”. but even with current system, a lot of work is published which is substandard. if we can release work in open, and colaborate as we do for open source software, thart would be the ideal thing for me. Each issue could be a literal git issue, each correction can be a pull request, and so on. Fully transparent, and somewhat resistant to whole network failing. (assuming you have local copies, you can just spin another instance, and your paper still stays onloine)