Well the fediverse is not the same as the technology behind or the standar.

Would the ActivityPub standar be helpfull in that particular, unexplored camp? I think so, but it takes creativity to create an idea and then land it.

Now, this problem of exploitation has more to do with universities, companies and government institutions, and i doubt this technology could change that.

Someone on Twitter pointed out the COAR Notify project, which appears to also be based on the Linked Data Notifications standard.

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

This would definitely work, and in fact there’s ongoing projects going in this direction. Most notably there’s OLKI:

Bringing research papers, datasets and peer reviews to a larger network of federated social platforms, with no vendor lock-in and on a platform you can host and control.

• Federated peer reviews
• Federated document annotation
• Federated scientific interaction
• Federated scientific watch

Another project, that - while not directly providing this use case - goes in the right direction is SkoHub, that allows you to “extend the scope of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) to also act as communication hubs for publishers and information seekers”.

(Both the SkoHub and OLKI project teams are members of SocialHub, and - not sure - SkoHub may be presenting on the 2nd webinar of the ActivityPub for EU Administrations event that we are organizing)

The nice thing is that ActivityPub - while being a very basic standard in itself, layered on top of ActivityStreams (basic social primitives) - is a Linked Data standard. You can extend with vocabularies towards any business or application domain, and describe not only the messaging / federation concepts, but also the information model of your app.

And preferably advocate to standardize on the vocabulary extension, so that other apps independently created to yours, can still seamlessly interoperate. Right now most fediverse applications are modeled around a Microblogging domain, which gives most people the impression that this is what ActivityPub’s primary use case is. But it goes way further than that.

Also note that “being part of the fediverse” need not be central to your adoption of ActivityPub. Federating between your own app instances, or exclusively to apps within a particular domain is also a valid use case. I wrote something about that on the SocialHub forum: Positioning ActivityPub: De-Emphasize “Being Part of the Fediverse” as primary USP.

(PS: I co-maintain AP watchlists that give an overview of all stuff that is under development. See AP Apps Watchlist and AP Developer Resources Watchlist. On the latter you find e.g. libraries like Go-Fed that allow you to generate code from your Linked Data vocabulary, to ease app development)