So, as an academic myself, I have been wondering. Why don't some tech-savy people (the kinds that roam around HN) create an open-source publishing platform and offer journals to use their services for free / cheaply? Something like a GitLab for publishing papers. I wouldn't be surprised if the German government would agree to fund such a thing these days. This would make such a jump for willing editorial boards much easier.
The European Commission (EC) has been funding zenodo.org[0] for some years now, which is an open-source publishing platform[1] built on an open-source digital library framework[2]. While its main focus is providing free hosting and serving as a publishing venue for scientific data and results in order to enable reproducibility of the research, it can also be used (by anyone!) to "publish" their research (or just about anything you'd want to publish).
While I guess it's not technically a journal as there's no editorial or review process for what gets published (and absolutely no prestige associated with publishing on it), everything is assigned a DOI number which you could use to uniquely identify it for citation purposes.
The story behind it, as off-handedly told to me by the then-project manager back in 2015 when I was working on it, is that it was created after the EC had mandated that some percentage of EC-funded research results be published in open-access and the instutions which received such funding complained that there existed no proper open-access alternatives for them to publish in.
Adding to the list of great options here: I'm part of a team based out of MIT that has been building an open-source, hosted journal publishing platform called PubPub: https://pubpub.org
We're part of a group trying to address some of the larger ecosystem problems in knowledge creation and ownership discussed in this thread called the Knowledge Futures Group (https://kfg.mit.edu/). We've just setup a discourse forum for folks interested in working with us (https://discourse.knowledgefutures.org).
The problem is not creating the software. The problem is getting academics, and the people funding them, to recognise alternative publishing outlets as valid, as long as the research they publish is valid.
(Disclosure: I'm working on something addressing that.)
The link's in my profile, but in a nutshell: it's taking the stamps of approval peer reviewers currently give, and removing the journal as its intermediary. So when researchers read an article that is not published in the traditional outlets (e.g. on a preprint server like arXiv), and they find that that article is up to scientific standards, they can publicly endorse that article right there to inform other potential readers and funders of that.
It's still early days and we're still testing the concept, but I think there's potential. I've got a newsletter that I haven't sent a mail to for a while, but if you're interested I'll eventually send an update there when there's more to share: https://tinyletter.com/Flockademic
I mean, github does too. Some projects have 0 stars, some have 16k; some have 0 contribs, some have thousands; some have no forks, some have hundred. You know what I mean ? All these variables are a pretty good measure of recognition, I check them every time I add dependencies to my projects. And just like any other measure, it isn't perfect and is hackable in ways I haven't imagined yet.
Forks are similar to citations in a way. It's not the same, there are many differences, but there are some similarities in my opinion. By the way, wouldn't it be great to be able to contribute to papers, and their assets (figures, code, equations) ? I don't know how a system like that might work in practice, it must be non trivial to govern, like any other sizable community - but I can see how it could work.
Does science really need to pay for recognition and prestige today ? It used to be the these journals allowed more people to have access to quality research, now it restricts them. Non free journals are dead a parellel universe Nietzsche might write.
The number of stars on GitHub is significant because most people whose opinion you’d care about are on GitHub, they wouldn’t star project that they were not interested in and there aren’t widespread fake accounts.
I don’t believe that there is an equivalent in academia, one that would capture the h-index dynamic (copied by PageRank) that a star from a prestigious professor is worth a lot more. It’s trivial to build, but “growth hacking” for lack of a better word, is hard, especially in areas where actual growth hacking would be frowned upon.
That’s why, for instance, Facebook celebrates its billion of users so much: it’s genuinely hard to make that. Hosting them too, but not in the same way.
In case you're interested: I'm working with eLife and the Center for Open Science on creating something just like that. Having those two organisations as partners has really boosted the profile, leading to others jumping on board.
There's still ways to go, but I think we're on the right track. But you're right: it's really hard, and it took me a year to even get here.
You've made an argument for looking through the projects which people whose opinion you care about have starred, not an argument for why GitHub stars are significant. Simply looking at number of stars doesn't provide you with much meaningful information.
It's also worth considering when someone starred a project. In my experience, people don't usually won't go and update their old stars, so it shouldn't be taken as endorsement. You don't know what state the project was in at the time it was starred. It's common for project to evolve over time, and it's not always for the positive.
The significance of starring a project is also poorly defined. Many people use GitHub stars as a form of bookmarking. You generally don't know the reason why someone starred a project. For example, just because someone has starred a library doesn't mean that they'd use it in production.
> The number of stars on GitHub is significant because most people whose opinion you’d care about are on GitHub, they wouldn’t star project that they were not interested in and there aren’t widespread fake accounts.
I am on Github and have been active in FOSS for years and yet I rarely star any projects at all, Github stars to me seem like vanity (just like likes on Facebook) indicative of perhaps hype but not of value.
Fully agree. But whenever an editorial board (like the one here) is fed up, they might be more likely to make the jump. I believe we may be about to reach a critical mass behind open access, but publishers won't make this easy.
Agreed that it could be useful to have a "go to" project to rally around.
Arxiv.org is very successful for pre-prints, at least in some fields like computer science. Maybe a modern "journal" offering review and editing could be built on top of that? It would utilize open reviews instead of the traditional anonymous private reviews. Once a certain bar has been reached with reviews, the paper can be nominated for appearing in a journal, which editors can decide on.
do any such submission systems feature (basic) bloat detection? like go through all images, calculate bits per paper area, look at color histogram to detect if vector graphics, like plots or system diagrams or other drawings were submitted as raster images instead of vector graphics in order to prompt the submitter to ask if he still has the original vector graphics format, and then build lists of typical file formats which need converters to standard vector graphics formats etc?
i have no idea. You are asking for features that make sense for dead tree journals, but i dont think these should be relevant anymore.
I am very much against the "huge and stringest" requirements that journals have about formatting. It is a huge time waster for researchers and their students that offers next to zero benefit. About time we switch to HTML formatting & simple microdata for references.
Looked into it in the past. The work required would not be trivial so for funding would be required. Funding can be difficult - especially in Europe - to get for taking on a pure technical project (would have to add blockchain right now). It's more like you have to find an initial smaller business problem to tackle first and tackle the bigger problem indirectly.
Other people have addressed the catch about prestige which makes this difficult. There is often some amount of cost, even if editors 'donate their time for free' (which, of course, is usually the case even for the traditional journals - the copy-editors are paid, but the content editors often do it for free, because it's a prestige economy). But individuals have created true open journals, like Glossa (mentioned in the article) and Semantics & Pragmatics ( http://semprag.org/ ), which are in fact prestigious.
