Pevo whitepaper public release (+ teaser site)
We proudly announce the release of our Whitepaper!
Pevo will be a decentral long-term digital archive for scholarly publishing through the open access paradigm and a web platform facilitating continuous open evaluation. The invention is based on blockchain technology powered by Steem.
Download the paper at https://pevo.science
We already have some contacts at the local university (Leuphana Lüneburg), the next meeting will be with the head of research and the director of the library. Several members of the international scientific community are contributing in different ways, and everyone is welcome to join us on our quest to shape the future of scientific publishing and discussion.
This project was planned to be partially funded by witness funds. Unfortunately, the witness has been voted out. Please support Pevo by voting it back in!
ELSEVIER COMPLAINT SHUTS DOWN SCI-HUB DOMAIN NAME
Sci-Hub is facing millions of dollars in damages in a lawsuit filed by Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. As a result of the legal battle the site just lost one of its latest domain names. However, the site has no intentions of backing down, and will continue its fight to keep access to scientific knowledge free and open.
https://torrentfreak.com/elsevier-complaint-shuts-down-sci-hub-domain-name-160504/
Decentralization is the key. :)
Updated OP for release of whitepaper
My brother and I (BitSpace) was just in contact with a professor at the local University yesterday who has been thinking about this kind of thing for a long time. He has a lot of high value ideas and connections, so hopefully we can help him to integrate his vision using Steem or at least the Graphene Toolkit, hopefully merging with this project. It will take some time, but it would be huge to get scientifically established players involved. :)
Status update:
The paper is reaching its final form. Some changes are still pending, but mostly formatting and formulation issues.
We have a first contact to a scientist from Cambridge who is actively promoting Open Science since years, and an alleged contact to a professor from Oslo (see clains' comment). We also have an appointment at our local university (Lüneburg, Germany), which already supports Open Access in various ways.
The plans for the platform itself are coming together, we're having more and more ideas all the time, and expect a lot more to come from our contacts.
Logo work proved to be a challenge, our designer team is still in thinking-mode. As soon as that is done we'll set up a teaser site with the paper. Don't try to help, we also got a new name ;-)
We didn't find a lawyer who would be confident to support the project yet. As soon as crypto is mentioned most back out, especially when it comes to the financing-through-witness part. We got an appointment with a foundation consultant next week, I don't expect very much from him though (his first question on the phone was why we want to offer the service for free).
The appointment went a lot better than expected. He kept asking (silly) questions, which in the end all were worth asking. We gained a lot of confidence in addressing the possible concerns he came up with.
He likes what we presented and will help us getting the project started, we agreed to make another appointment in a couple of weeks.
I forgot I'd already seen this post so my apologies.....I just posted something similar because it's been on my mind a lot!
No need to apologize. When you got some time you're welcome to dive into the whitepaper and comment your ideas!
I am very excited for your project. Once it is launched, i will contact my brother in-law. He is a professor at la Sorbone in Paris and post-doc in particle physics. He may be a valuable connection
lol, posting stuff on Steem and asking to not share :)
Besides that, I would love to see this get more attention. I'd love to put my reseach documents there as well.
We may only need some additional plugins to the available frontends to allow more sophisticated content like equations etc.
I think papers would just be compiled into a PDF that is linked to (with hash) from the Steem post along with just the abstract, title, and authors. But the abstract might have some math in it that needs to be rendered, and anyway it would be great to have some TeX support directly in Steem posts. I had already requested MathJax support for steemit.com on the Steem Slack in the last few days. It will be essential if we hope to attract this community, for example.
Now ... Here we go! Push on!
Make sure to incorporate some sort of peer-review process. Its not a perfect system, but it does aide in reducing the number of articles that are just plain poor science. I have reviewed quite a few that I found astonishing someone felt was acceptable. With out any sort of peer review there would be no check to ensure some sort of base level of quality to the published work.
Low quality papers will get identified quickly when we passed a certain userbase threshold. The scientific crowd can evaluate a paper a lot better and more dynamic than simple peer reviews.
The whole platform will work very similar to steemit, but with a seperate curation system. Every account will be connected to a real life person, and we let them do whatever they think is best. It's their work, and their reputation. We can't let someone else decide for them what's good or not.
Filter functions will allow everyone to create their own bubble when necessary.
I also think bad or even outright hilarious papers and their metadata like votes, voters and comments may provide interesting data in some ways.
In general I do not know for certain that the general scientific community possesses the specialization necessary to accurately judge the quality of all published works outside of their field of interest. While I am interested in a decentralized paper publication platform, I do not know that it would be able to effectively curate articles of actual quality, and would focus more on those with more flashy and easy to digest conclusions. In all it is a worth while experiment to see how the results would turnout, however I remain skeptical (as any scientist worth their weight should be, a healthy dose of skepticism keeps work judged fairly).
This could be a solution for scientists who are not welcome in mainstream/status-quo 'science'. (I did upvote btw, the downvote bug decided otherwise)
I'm looking forward to being a part of the #pevo project