To me this situation is crying out for a cooperative model, whereby the people and organisations that wish to produce and consume the knowledge come together to jointly meet their needs.

The Guardian piece that prompted me to visit here (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-scientific-journals) suggests that UK universities alone are spending something like £200 million annually with publishers currently. Clearly this money could be used instead to build and maintain a not-for-profit system that could do a far better job at a far lower cost.

As is pointed out above, an online platform would serve this approach very well.

- The reviews could initially show only to the reviewers and the author
- Someone who reviews a lot but doesn’t get reviews could maybe trade his rep points? Sounds a bit iffy though…
- Force login with google, fb, openID etc. The web is going away from anonymity anyway.
-I also think that the rep point system should not be taken too seriously. Number of citations should of course still weigh a lot more that some reputation points. But gamification isn’t all that bad IMO.
-Also, it should NOT be too complicated. It would only end up in an uncontrollable shitstorm…

(and pardon me for not having read Tim’s later post yet either)

I think we are currently in brainstorming phase and no proposal is solid. So we must try to come up with an ideal philosophy before action, and I perceive this to be Tim’s effort as well. The ideal one will undoubtedly seem radical by current standards, since the journal system is hopelessly outdated and not in line with the potentials in our new online world. The old system will still have its adherents like classical music, and co-existence of the old and the new is inevitable. Perhaps the new way could take the shape of a movement, with a manifesto of guiding principles.

Best wishes, Jozsef

What you write is quite interesting “research would become a coherent evolving online encyclopedia”, something similar also came to my friend’s mind some years ago, but may be it is too radical or it least may be such project should coexist with Tim’s proposal. And wikipedia may be considered as a kind of good prototype for this.

Best wishes, Alex

As far as blogs vs. a wiki, it’s not a matter of comforting analogy, but long-term functionality.

I like to compare blog posts to articles and wikis to textbooks. Blogs offer news, wikis offer the core. Lets not mingle them.

Having experienced other social networks with a creativity streak – mostly in art like Deviantart – the danger of “gamification” or “score-hunting” does arise as many here have realized in advance. Then there is the issue of getting lost in the crowd unless the ranking algorithm is phenomenal – hardly ever. Any ranking system would reduce a person to a score, but how could the scoreless / no-reputation newbie researcher be noticed for something ingenious? People would just follow the big fish, because there would be way too many little fish tiring their eyes. (Just consider, we all follow Terence Tao’s blog, but who follows ours?)

So I have got to the point where I discarded the above idea altogether (though I still am in a dilemma whether to create such a blog with a limited group of researchers inviting each other). Instead I asked myself, why are we doing research in the first place? Is it not to contribute to something greater than ourselves… the development of mathematics / science? Do we really need to be credited for our contributions? Does it have to be an ego game? How about a world of research where no-one cares about who did what? See where I’m getting at…? Wikipedia! Sure, there are wiki sites on math, but what if that’s all research would become?

The above idea is a little naive in its brevity and humility. The actual website would have to be a little more sophisticated than a wiki, to account for measuring contributions and the relevance of those contributions (one will still need to put something on their resume to land a job). Possibly a thumbs up/down system per each wiki edit per user (stars don’t work btw). If an edit gets too many downs, it would get removed. Let’s just keep it simple. (No wiki discussion pages = battlefields either, they are soul-killing.) Then on one’s personal profile, the contribution stats could be shown, exportable for resumes. So quantity vs. quality would be displayed analytically.

As far as the edits themselves, a user would have total freedom as on a wiki. Brief to longer edits ok. An edit would be highlighted as new for let’s say 3 days, at which point the votes would decide if it remains included in the body of text. But if a person gets too many thumbs down on edits, they could be identified as potential spammers by the admins. The site should require a scan of one’s master’s degree and edits would be only permitted in that field of science, as verified by admins upon registration. (Thus no need for a weighted voting system, since users would be professionals by default, and a newbie’s vote is potentially as accurate as others’.) The site could be peer-invitation only in its infancy, to ensure coherence of material through existing collaborative relationships. The first researchers invited should be prime representatives and authors of a field, so their writing would serve as the foundations of the website. We would always see where research is at by just scrolling to the end of an article. There would be no need to write intros to topics as we did in papers, since the info would all be there.

So to sum up the idea, research would become a coherent evolving online encyclopedia striving for absolute complete knowledge, just like it should have always been in real life in my opinion. Let’s admit, the current journal system has always been just a substitute for the real thing, that we couldn’t yet make happen without the technology… but now we can! What do you think? Worth a try?

4. People might not like to have their papers evaluated in public.

How about instead, the reviews only to be visible to a small number of people, including the author(s), all people who have commented on the same article, and the editorial board of the journal to which the article is submitted for publication.

Indeed, if I submit a paper, I would not mind getting even negative responses (especially if I would have the opportunity to respond to them), provided I know the discussion stays “within the community”, within the group of people who care about the article. But I would not like Joe Doe from the street who has no idea about mathematics in general to read inner workings of a paper that is not yet in its very final form.

I look at arxiv.org as announcing a result, and at journal publication as confirming its correctness. Both are necessary, but the former can not be a substitute for the latter.

Your suggestion can remodel the reviewing process for the journals that care to follow your method.

Also, I don’t understand the purpose of reputation points. (I know, this is a statement, not a question. ) What if somebody comments only once in a while, but the comments go to the core, while another person responds every day about spelling? Both types of responses should be welcome, but it seems to me unjust to issue reputation points.

Maybe we also need two-party negotiations about prices. So far publishers unilaterally dictate prices for journals and libraries deciding one-by-one have little power (beside dropping a journal) on price decisions.

Best
elf32

The current peer review system is broken. It may still be working within narrow subfields, but it will not cope with the increasing volume.
Web-based scientific publishing is a necessity. The exact mechanisms
will evolve gradually and the ideas outlined above could be used as starting points.

The idea of timestamping information is actually centuries old. For example, when Robert Hooke discovered Hooke’s law in 1660, he did not want to publish it yet, but wanted to be able to claim priority. So he published the anagram ceiiinosssttuv and later published the translation ut tensio sic vis (Latin for “as is the extension, so is the force”). Similarly, Galileo first published his discovery of the phases of Venus in the anagram form.

My question is then: If this paragraph means that Galileo followed up, then what software would prove it?

What is your definition of “seriousness”? If a service is free, it can be revoked at any time. Nobody is obliged to work for you for free, you know.

If you are concerned about truthfulness of time stamps, there is a cryptographic proof that the chain of time stamps is increasing. I had in mind a more complex scheme, where many witnesses check time stamps with their clocks. A single agent (even government) does not provide a truthful service, this is commonly accepted.