this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Can't we all researcher who is technically good at web servers start a opensource alternative to these paid services. I get that we need to publish to a renowned publisher, but we also decide together to publish to an alternative opensource option. This way the alternate opensource option also grows.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Like arxiv.org?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Does it have all the new research paper regarding medicine and pharmacological action and newer drug interactions and stuff?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

That's not what was asked for though lol

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Some time last year I learned of an example of such a project (peerreview on GitHub):

The goal of this project was to create an open access "Peer Review" platform:

Peer Review is an open access, reputation based scientific publishing system that has the potential to replace the journal system with a single, community run website. It is free to publish, free to access, and the plan is to support it with donations and (eventually, hopefully) institutional support.

It allows academic authors to submit a draft of a paper for review by peers in their field, and then to publish it for public consumption once they are ready. It allows their peers to exercise post-publish quality control of papers by voting them up or down and posting public responses.

I just looked it up now to see how it is going... And I am a bit saddened to find out that the developer decided to stop. The author has a blog in which he wrote about the project and about why he is not so optimistic about the prospects of crowd sourced peer review anymore: https://www.theroadgoeson.com/crowdsourcing-peer-review-probably-wont-work , and related posts referenced therein.

It is only one opinion, but at least it is the opinion of someone who has thought about this some time and made a real effort towards the goal, so maybe you find some value from his perspective.

Personally, I am still optimistic about this being possible. But that's easy for me to say as I have not invested the effort!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I do like the intermediaries that have popped up, like PubPeer. I highly recommend that everyone get the extension as it adds context to many different articles.

https://pubpeer.com/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's really cool, I will use it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

It's been surprisingly helpful, it even flags linked pages, like on Wikipedia.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

This kind of thing needs to be started by universities and/or research institutes. Not the code part, but the organising the first journals part. It's going to get nowhere without establishment buy-in.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Challenge is how to jump start a platform where the researchers come to

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I mean a paper is renowned if many people cute from it

We could just try citing more free papers, whenever possible (as long as they still have peer review)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Citation count is a shoddy metric for a paper's quality. Not just because there's citation cartels, but because the reason stuff gets cited is not contained in the metric. And then to top it all off as soon as a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a metric.