A proposal for a decentralized, peer-reviewed academic journal system for the Web

Hi folks, I took part of this weekend to write the following blog post
on how PaySwarm could be applied to create a decentralized,
peer-reviewed academic journal system for the Web. The original post can
be found here:

http://manu.sporny.org/2013/payswarm-journals/

The full-text is included below:

Aaron Swartz, PaySwarm, and Academic Journals

   For those of you that haven’t heard yet, [1]Aaron Swartz [2]took
   his own life two days ago. Larry Lessig has a follow-up on [3]one
   of the reasons he thinks led to his suicide (the threat of 50
   years in jail over the JSTOR case).

   I didn’t know Aaron at all. A large number of people that I deeply
   respect did, and have [4]written about his life with [5]great
   admiration. I, like most of you that have read the news, have done
   so while brewing a cauldron of mixed emotions. Saddened that
   someone that had achieved so much good in their life is no longer
   in this world. Angry that Aaron chose this ending. Sickened that
   this is the second recent suicide, [6]Iilya’s being the first,
   involving a young technologist trying to make the world a better
   place for all of us. Afraid that other technologists like Aaron
   and Iilya will choose this path over persisting in their noble
   causes. Helpless. Helpless because this moment will pass, just
   like Iilya’s did, with no great change in the way our society
   deals with mental illness. With no great change, in what Aaron was
   fighting for, having been realized.

   Nobody likes feeling helpless. I can’t mourn Aaron because I
   didn’t know him. I can mourn the idea of Aaron, of the things he
   stood for. While reading about what he stood for, several
   disconnected ideas kept rattling around in the back of my head:

    1. We’ve hit a point of ridiculousness in our society where
       people at [7]HSBC knowingly laundering money for drug cartels
       get away with it, while people like Aaron are labeled a felon
       and face upwards of 50 years in jail for “stealing” academic
       articles. This, even after the publisher of said academic
       articles drops the charges. MIT never dropped their charges.
    2. MIT should make it clear that he was not a felon or a
       criminal. MIT should posthumously pardon Aaron and commend him
       for his life’s work.
    3. The way we do peer-review and publish scientific research has
       to change.
    4. I want to stop reading about all of this, it’s heartbreaking.
       I want to do something about it – make something positive out
       of this mess.

Ideas, Floating

   I was catching up on news this morning when the following floated
   past on Twitter:

     clifflampe: It seems to me that the best way for we academics
     to honor Aaron Swartz’s memory is to frigging finally figure
     out open access publishing.

     1Copenut: @clifflampe And finally implement a micropayment
     system like @manusporny’s #payswarm. I don’t want the paper-but
     I’ll pay for the stories.

     1Copenut: @manusporny These new developments with #payswarm are
     a great advance. Is it workable with other backends like
     #Middleman or #Sinatra?

   This was interesting because we have been talking about how
   PaySwarm could be applied to academic publishing for a while now.
   All the discussions to this point have been internal, we didn’t
   know if anybody would make the connection between the
   infrastructure that PaySwarm provides and how it could be applied
   to academic journals. This is up on our ideas board as a potential
   area that PaySwarm could be applied:

     * Payswarm for peer-reviewed, academic publishing
          + Use Payswarm identity mechanism to establish trusted
            reviewer and author identities for peer review
          + Use micropayment mechanism to fund research
          + Enable university-based group-accounts for purchasing
            articles, or refunding researcher purchases

Journals as Necessary Evils

   For those in academia, journals are often viewed as a necessary
   evil. They cost a fortune to subscribe to, farm out most of their
   work to academics that do it for free, and employ an iron-grip on
   the scientific publication process. Most academics that I speak
   with would do away with journal organizations in a heartbeat if
   there was a viable alternative. Most of the problem is political,
   which is why we haven’t felt compelled to pursue fixing it.
   Political problems often need a groundswell of support and a
   number of champions that are working inside the community. I think
   the groundswell is almost here. I don’t know who the set of
   academic champions are that will be the ones to push this forward.
   Additionally, if nobody takes the initiative to build such a
   system, things won’t change.

   Here’s what we (Digital Bazaar) have been thinking. To fix the
   problem, you need at least the following core features:
     * Web-scale identity mechanisms – so that you can identify
       reviewers and authors for the peer-review process regardless
       of which site is publishing or reviewing a paper.
     * Decentralized solution – so that universities and researchers
       drive the process – not the publishers of journals.
     * Some form of remuneration system – you want to reward
       researchers with heavily cited papers, but in a way that makes
       it very hard to game the system.

Scientific Remuneration

   [8]PaySwarm could be used to implement each of these core
   features. At its core, PaySwarm is a decentralized payment
   mechanism for the Web. It also has a decentralized identity
   mechanism that is solid, but in a way that does not violate your
   privacy. There is a [9]demo that shows how it can be applied to
   WordPress blogs where just an abstract is published, and if the
   reader wants to see more of the article, they can pay a small fee
   to read it. It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to
   replace “blog article” with “research paper”. The hope is that
   researchers would set access prices on articles such that any
   purchase to access the research paper would then go to directly
   funding their current research. This would empower universities
   and researchers with an additional revenue stream while reducing
   the grip that scientific publishers currently have on our
   higher-education institutions.

A Decentralized Peer-review Process

   Remuneration is just one aspect of the problem. Arguably, it is
   the lesser of the problems in academic publishing. The biggest
   technical problem is how you do peer review on a global,
   distributed scale. Quite obviously, you need a solid identity
   system that can identify scientists over the long term. You need
   to understand a scientists body of work and how respected their
   research is in their field. You also need a review system that is
   capable of pairing scientists and papers in need of review.
   PaySwarm has a strong identity system in place using the Web as
   the identification mechanism. Here is the PaySwarm identity that I
   use for development: [10]https://dev.payswarm.com/i/manu. Clearly,
   paper publishing systems wouldn’t expose that identity URL to
   people using the system, but I include it to show what a Web-scale
   identifier looks like.

Web-scale Identity

   If you go to that identity URL, you will see two sets of
   information: my public financial accounts and my digital signature
   keys. A PaySwarm Authority can annotate this identity with even
   more information, like whether or not an e-mail address has been
   verified against the identity. Is there a verified cellphone on
   record for the identity? Is there a verified driver’s license on
   record for the identity? What about a Twitter handle? A Google+
   handle? All of these pieces of information can be added and
   verified by the PaySwarm Authority in order to build an identity
   that others can trust on the Web.

   What sorts of pieces of information need to be added to a PaySwarm
   identity to trust its use for academic publishing? Perhaps a list
   of articles published by the identity? Review comments for all
   other papers that have been reviewed by the identity? Areas of
   research that other’s have certified that the identity is an
   expert on? This is pretty basic Web-of-trust stuff, but it’s
   important to understand that PaySwarm has this sort of stuff baked
   into the core of the design.

The Process

   Leveraging identity to make decentralized peer-review work is the
   goal, and here is how it would work from a researcher perspective:
    1. A researcher would get a PaySwarm identity from any PaySwarm
       Authority, there is no cost associated with getting such an
       identity. This sub-system is already implemented in PaySwarm.
    2. A researcher would publish an abstract of their paper in a
       [11]Linked Data format such as [12]RDFa. This abstract would
       identify the authors of the paper and some other basic
       information about the paper. It would also have a digital
       signature on the information using the PaySwarm identity that
       was acquired in the previous step. The researcher would set
       the cost to access the full article using any
       PaySwarm-compatible system. All of this is already implemented
       in PaySwarm.
    3. A paper publishing system would be used to request a review
       among academic peers. Those peers would review the paper and
       publish digital signatures on review comments, possibly with a
       notice that the paper is ready to be published. This
       sub-system is fairly trivial to implement and would mirror the
       current review process with the important distinction that it
       would not be centralized at journal publications.
    4. Once a pre-set limit on the number of positive reviews has
       been met, the paper publishing system would place its stamp of
       approval on the paper. Note that different paper publishing
       systems may have different metrics just as journals have
       different metrics today. One benefit to doing it this way is
       that you don’t need a paper publishing system to put its stamp
       of approval on a paper at all. If you really wanted to, you
       could write the software to calculate whether or not the paper
       has gotten the appropriate amount of review because all of the
       information is on the Web by default. This part of the system
       would be fairly trivial to write once the metrics were known.
       It may take a year or two to get the correct set of metrics in
       place, but it’s not rocket science and it doesn’t need to be
       perfect before systems such as this are used to publish
       papers.

   From a reviewer perspective, it would work like so:
    1. You are asked to review papers by your peers once you have an
       acceptable body of published work. All of your work can be
       verified because it is tied to your PaySwarm identity. All
       review comments can be verified as they are tied to other
       PaySwarm identities. This part is fairly trivial to implement,
       most of the work is already done for PaySwarm.
    2. Once you review a paper, you digitally sign your comments on
       the paper. If it is a good paper, you also include a claim
       that it is ready for broad publication. Again, technically
       simple to implement.
    3. Your reputation builds as you review more papers. The way that
       reputation is calculated is outside of the scope of this blog
       post mainly because it would need a great deal of input from
       academics around the world. Reputation is something that can
       be calculated, but many will argue about the algorithm and I
       would expect this to oscillate throughout the years as the
       system grows. In the end, there will probably be multiple
       reputation algorithms, not just one. All that matters is that
       people trust the reputation algorithms.

Freedom to Research and Publish

   The end-goal is to build a system that empowers researchers and
   research institutions, is far more transparent than the current
   peer-reviewed publishing system, and remunerates the people doing
   the work more directly. You will also note that at no point does a
   traditional journal enter the picture to give you a stamp of
   approval and charge you a fee for publishing your paper.
   Researchers are in control of the costs at all stages. As I’ve
   said above, the hard part isn’t the technical nature of the
   project, it’s the political nature of it. I don’t know if this is
   enough of a pain-point among academics to actually start doing
   something about it today. I know some are, but I don’t know if
   many would use such a system over the draw of publications like
   Nature, PLOS, Molecular Genetics and Genomics, and Planta. Quite
   obviously, what I’ve proposed above isn’t a complete road map.
   There are issues and details that would need to be hammered out.
   However, I don’t understand why a system like this doesn’t already
   exist, so I implore the academic community to explain why what
   I’ve laid out above hasn’t been done yet.

   It’s obvious that a system like this would be good for the world.
   Building such a system may have reduced the possibility of us
   losing someone like Aaron in the way that we did. He was certainly
   fighting for something like it. Talking about it makes me feel a
   bit less helpless than I did yesterday. Maybe making something
   good out of this mess will help some of you out there as well. If
   others offer to help, we can start building it.

   So how about it researchers of the world, would you publish all of
   your research through such a system?

References

   1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
   2.
http://business.time.com/2013/01/13/tech-prodigy-and-internet-activist-aaron-swartz-commits-suicide/
   3. http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully
   4. http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html
   5. http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=644
   6.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-co-founder-of-social-network-dies-at-22.html?_r=0
   7.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/videos/taibbi-spitzer-fume-over-hsbc-settlement-20121214
   8. http://payswarm.com/
   9. http://payswarm.com/wiki/WordPress_Recipes_Demo
  10. https://dev.payswarm.com/i/manu
  11. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_xzT5eF5Q
  12. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-primer/

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: HTML5 and RDFa 1.1
http://manu.sporny.org/2012/html5-and-rdfa/

Received on Monday, 14 January 2013 17:58:44 UTC