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.
  • sga@lemmings.worldEnglish
    10·
    20 hours ago

    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.

    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.

    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)

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    9·
    21 hours ago

    Hmm. So are you thinking about the peer review part, primarily? Arxiv already exists and I’m guessing it’s easy to mirror.