For academics - Is there any feasibility in Journals being replaced with federation
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.
Currently, credibility is verified in centralized manner for good reasons. One of them is to keep the shams out of the game. Sadly, such system has been abused rampantly.
Such issue wouldn't be as prevalent on Lemmy due to the casual nature of things, but if the stakes are to be raised, then it would really become a problem. Just look at how people have tried to abuse the very system we're using.
The voting manipulation comes to mind, with rogue instances being created just for the purpose of mobilizing an army of bot in the form of users. Since the very people doing the exploits were the ones running the instances, and the bot users were created in these rogue instances, the good instances (such as the one you're using and the one I'm using) had no control. The could create millions of users if they want to and if the resource allows it, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. They could the use these bot users to either raise a post to the front of your feed, or downvote it to oblivion. The one thing that can be done is to defederate from these rogue instances one way or another.
This is just one example. I'm sure there are many more vulnerabilities out there. Maybe in time, the fediverse would become more and more mature against such thread model. Switching to instance whitelisting for federation policy has proved to be effective against the one I just mentioned.
One thing that we can probably start with instead is to have independent journals, and maybe they can support one and another. The question would then be: how would they earn the credibility that our community can trust?
To me, that sounds like it'll create more issues than it'll solve. Part of why it's difficult to get rid of large journals is because people like the centralization. Even beyond the obvious pride aspect of getting into an exclusive journal, a big reason for having journals is that it is much easier to find relevant papers if they're collected and catalogued into a small number of large repositories (ie, journals).
Federation intrinsically has lower discoverability, and it is difficult enough to find relevant papers that you want. And due to decentralization, it is more difficult to separate out the troll articles from the serious ones. That doesn't matter if federation is used for a social media platform or if it is used for peer-to-peer communication, but it seems to run counter to the purpose of publishing scientific articles.
And that's not counting the issues that you would have with the review process on a federated service
yeah, you bring up a lot of good points there.
I was thinking there'd have to be different levels of the process, such as "submitted, reviewed, published" as well as "in the general repository" and "by this organization". The discoverability would still be hard due to the nature of federation.