RE: PRACTICAL THINKING. — Strategies for open, free, and transparent scientific publishing. It's the future of publishing. But how do you get the future earlier? Sooner rather than later?
I will rewrite what I wrote in the other post. Unfortunately, I have no time to talk further, but maybe tonight on discord? :)
Unfortunately I have not that much time to answer deeply, but let' see that I partially agree. I come from a field where everything is public, can be open access by selecting the right journals and even for free, so... Even all papers are freely available on the arxiv. So my problems are somehow slightly different :)
By the way, everything is open access in particle physics thanks to the Scoap3 initiative where institutes from all over the world pay for it. This is not optimal, but already better than nothing.
But of course, this is not the case for any other field different from particle physics and solution must be built. I hope to be able to witness this in my lifetime.
If I have well understood, you would like to have a kind of steem-based platform like the arxiv (but maybe with different rules on how the tokens are attributed; this is the reputation thing the pevo people are after). But then why not simply the arxiv. I don't really understand the need for the token. Why is not an arxiv-like version enough?
Okay, the weak spot of the arxiv is the referral system that is not existent. Then we have scipost. I actually don't see what we should have in addition to this? Scipost includes mostly everything that you mentioned.
Maybe competitors (like pevo)? But the idea is the best so far, IMO. I still don't see where and how the tokens enter the game, but well... to be discussed.
I suggest that if there will be peer reviewing based on reputations, there will need to be identity verifying tokens to sign reviews. So that the system is as trustless and autonomous as possible. All to keep human labor costs as low as possible.
The tokens also track different kinds of reputation. Consider if a major scientist is submitting biased reviews of the work of his competition. His papers might be good, but his ability to write reviews of reviews might be weighted down. This is especially needed in the social sciences . . . wow it's needed there. They have the equivalent of flag wars in those fields. What is the difference between Keynesians, New Keynesians, Neo Keynesians, Classical Keynesians, and Heterodox Keynesians? I don't know, except that they dislike each other . . . Oh, yes, I forgot about some people, the Post Keynesians . . .
No children left behind.: /
Different tokens are needed to automatically disaggregate all that needs to be kept separate. And that while keeping the human labor involved in managing journals as low as possible. I don't like administrative work, it's time consuming and often fruitless. Let the computers do it. We'll create algorithms for the computers and verify they are carried out by secure tokens.
For example, there was a paper basically proving that involuntary unemployement exists on the premise that if a prospective employee went to an interview and offered to work, but only to work some very small number of hours, such as zero hours, he would not be hired . . .
That's trivial, one might tell the author. Such a paper is either satire or nonsense.
Such a paper is pure wordplay . . . but it was published as if a valid result in a well known journal.
If automatically chosen to review that paper I would've voted not to publish it. To keep it at most as ``submitted'' status. But what happens when retaliation votes come back? Those votes would have be reviewed and themselves voted down and this tracked and this at many levels . . . or better and simpler each subfield of science has it's own token and there are exchange rates for tokens . . . Something like that. (I wonder if some fields would have very bad exchange rates relative all the others.)
I understand the issue. I think that having full open access (including to the review) would help! People will think twice before reviewing (and potentially loosing their credibility).