I’ve been thinking lately about what federation might look like in academic publishing. Publishing of academic research is currently a rather archaic system that serves to exploit the labor of researchers and academics, primarily for the financial gain of a few very large publishers. There have been some efforts to retake the publishing infrastructure and create scholar owned systems with varying degrees of success. Would the fediverse enable greater success in such an initiative or would it not make sense in this context?

  • @GrassrootsReview@lemmy.ml
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    fedilink
    13 years ago

    Scientific publishing and preprint servers are already federated. There are many different preprint servers and journals. You can start your own preprint server or your own journal. There are dedicated search engines for open access literature like BASE and CORE. If there is something that works badly on Mastodon or the Fediverse it is discovery, that is partially because it is federated, and partially by design to have a more friendly atmosphere.

    The federated publishing system does not have the same power-equalizing and improved curation properties as the federated social media system. To break the power of the publishers we need to bring back the control of the assessment of what good science is into the hands of scientists. Scientists already do all the work, but the publishers control the brands that determine how good an article is.

    So my proposal is to created a federated open post-publication peer review system. Most proposals for a “modern” peer review system are based on a central database, I prefer to do the peer review in small communities (like Mastodon instances), which can exchange peer review reports (like Toots) and moderate them. For details have a look at https://grassroots.is