Context (for those who might not be in academia): many academic publishing companies (like Elsevier) charge exorbitant prices for researchers to get their papers published as open access. Meanwhile, none of these researchers actually get anything in return for it (except for major street cred if their papers get highly cited)
Would be cool to see a decentralized journal or something. No idea how it would work actually work, but since research is supposed to be peer reviewed, why not just let the whole structure of it become open and decentralized?
Before cryptocurrencies really went to shit and became so toxic/scammy, I used to believe crypto could help decentralize it by democraticing the process and making it fully transparent, while also rewarding authors and peer reviewers for their work. But alas
I am somewhat familar with ERIC’s CLARIN (or ERIC CLARIN? or just CLARIN? I’m not sure how the two names are supposed to be used together). from the linked site:
I don’t fully understand how to operate it because it’s complicated but it does seem like a distributed scientific repository. It seems to focus on language but it’s not clear to me why it can’t, or doesn’t (or maybe it does IDK) function as a general datashare. I’m not sure if it’s a model for a full replacement of for-profit publishing houses but it seems like a promising direction for research to go.
I like the idea, but how to handle authentication in a decentralized system?
There are services like ORCID exist for uniquely attributing papers to an author. I think a federated review / publishing service could just provide a number of integrations for credential linking.
I was thinking about how such a tool might work over activity pub and I think it could work.
i’ve been thinking the same too, a decentralized place to upload / review papers with proper authorization with ORCID and the like would be nice