alt Hacker NewsI had been kinda hoping for a web-of-trust system to replace peer review. Anyone can endorse an article. You can decide which endorsers you trust, and do some network math to find what you think is reading. With hashes and signatures and all that rot.
Not as gate-keepy as journals and not as anarchic as purely open publishing. Should be cheap, too.
Replies
nradov • last Saturday at 3:59 PM
An endorsement system would have to be finer grained than a whole article. Mark specific sections that you agree or disagree with, along with comments.
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nurettin • last Saturday at 3:55 PM
What prevents you from creating an island of fake endorsers?
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ricksunny • last Saturday at 9:36 PM
Suggest writing up a scope or PRD for this and sharing it on GitHub.
slashdave • last Saturday at 9:43 PM
So trivial to game
The problem with an endorsement scheme is citation rings, ie groups of people who artificially inflate the perceived value of some line of work by citing each other. This is a problem even now, but it is kept in check by the fact that authors do not usually have any control over who reviews their paper. Indeed, in my area, reviews are double blind, and despite claims that “you can tell who wrote this anyway” research done by several chairs in our SIG suggests that this is very much not the case.
Fundamentally, we want research that offers something new (“what did we learn?”) and presents it in a way that at least plausibly has a chance of becoming generalizable knowledge. You call it gate-keeping, but I call it keeping published science high-quality.