Other comments have pointed out the prestige issue. My real issue with this is that academic findings need to be freed from the whole "paper" format: a static, discrete document. New findings compliment and invalidate older ones. In the old days there was no way to reflect this due to the static nature of print. The paper and its physical constraints do not need to exist with today's technology. One more thing -- How many times have you wondered if some journal somewhere has the answer to the question you're trying to answer (but don't know how to look it up)? The disparate, static content of journals resists the formation of a cohesive corpus of knowledge.
Github has no barrier to entry, yet does not have a prestige issue. People get hired based on the content of their github account. I can't see why funding agencies couldn't use a similar system to track the academic contributions of researchers.
It's ironic that the rest of the world has moved on to connected, consistent experiences while academics are still stuck with papers. I've been thinking after I submit my thesis that I should find other people that are likewise frustrated and try to build a better system for academic collaboration and dissemination. Perhaps something more like Wikipedia than a journal.
Alot of people want a wikipedia/github-like system but nobody will go there until it has the prestige. Academics are not early adopters. They are followers. I'm a professor in a STEM field at a major university so I'm speaking from experience.
Agreed. Would you say it helps if the funding agencies were on board with, say, having a non-profit foundation run this service? They would have a much easier time allocating their $ since the system can show who contributed what and how many people found it useful. I feel like PIs need to know they can pay the bills and as long as the money is coming we can get them to try out the new systems.
There are a lot of people trying lots of things. Eg a French startup is trying to do a kind of system for add it ng such micro contributions with blockchain to confirm who did the original contribution. It looks from my view a lot like a kind of specialised Twitter, but I'm not informed in depth of the system.
I think the main problem with any such system is that a paper has a certain weight. You can be sure that it has a minimum value. (and estimate its value from the journal it's published in). Number of contribuons does not give an equally good indicator - eg the most active users on Wikipedia are all bots doing minor edits.
In addition, there is no consensus building like on github for individual projects which each in turn can be judged on popularity/use/... . Having a similar system for a science corpus of knowledge would even more encourage status quo thinking than the current system.
Apart from that, having a self-contained paper has value as that's a package you can judge as relevant or not to your work. It's fairly easy to use as the author is basically doing the curation. Having all knowledge of a field in one single Wikipedia like entity could end up being overwhelming for anyone but (and maybe even) existing experts.
Does anyone know of any activity in this space by YC? The largest journal publisher, Elsevier Reed, has revenue of £5.9 Bn and 17% net margin [1]. Seems like there could be some interesting (and socially valuable) scope for disruption.
How do you solve the core problem though? As far as I can tell, the real issue is maintaining the "prestige" part for researchers. Anything that reduces friction in publishing decreases scarcity...which decreases the perceived prestige.
It's important to distinguish between researchers, reviewers/editors and publishers.
The academics who write a paper or make the decision to include it in a journal typically aren't paid. They benefit from the prestige signal generated by a famous journal (editors gain some control of research directions in their field and young academics get a signal validating the quality of their work). Publishers do the typesetting, hosting, distribution, marketing and other admin responsibilities and get grossly overpaid for this task [1].
The publishers clearly want to maintain the status-quo. However, I think both authors and editors would prefer lower journal subscription fees/greater open access for the papers. It would lead to lower costs for universities and broader audiences. However, coordinating away to this outcome is tricky, since (as you say) upstart journals are less prestigious so would offer lower initial influence and prestige to defectors. This is basically the classic path dependence problem from economics[2].
There are a couple of possible solutions to the problems:
(1) Incumbent publishers could be breaching European and American antitrust law. Competition authorities could prosecute them for charging excessive prices, bundling practices or placing unreasonable restrictions on academics wishing to make their research open access? Governments could also address this with specific policies.
(2) High profile academics, newly emerging fields or those particularly frustrated with the current system could coordinate to use open access publishing models. Tim Gower's discrete analysis is a good example of this [3].
(3) Researchers can develop alternative methods for assessing the quality of research, placing a lower weighting on the signal of journal prestige.
So I agree 'prestige' complicates the problem, but I don't think it makes it unsolvable. The more clearly the tech community explains the current system to government/regulators, the more likely they are to adopt sane policy in the area (1). The greater support the tech community can offer to disgruntled academics seeking alternatives (2)(3), the more likely they are to defect.
Is the code open source? Is it on GitHub?
Hunted around the site for a while but couldn't find the code. Mainly want to know which langauage it was built with.
Github has no barrier to entry, yet does not have a prestige issue. People get hired based on the content of their github account. I can't see why funding agencies couldn't use a similar system to track the academic contributions of researchers.
It's ironic that the rest of the world has moved on to connected, consistent experiences while academics are still stuck with papers. I've been thinking after I submit my thesis that I should find other people that are likewise frustrated and try to build a better system for academic collaboration and dissemination. Perhaps something more like Wikipedia than a journal.