Ask Lemmy
- For academics - Is there any feasibility in Journals being replaced with federation
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.
