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

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 2:58 PM, Steven Rowat <steven_rowat@sunshine.net> wrote:
>
> After this experience I took stock of my situation: I got paid nothing for
> the result of many years of work, even though this work had been accepted in
> one of the world's three main journals on the subject and was the reason I
> was being asked to peer-review; and nothing for peer-reviewing such work
> (realized I couldn't continue to ask editors to pay me for the
> peer-reviews). And I had another major monograph on the subject in progress.
> It was a tough decision.
>
> I squirmed around a bit, which I'll spare you; but in the end I shelved the
> monograph after the first draft, quit doing the research, refused the
> membership in the associations, and refused several other requests for peer
> review (the last one, amazingly, arriving as late as one year ago -- the
> system has a very long memory for the people it allows in, apparently).
>
> In the end I couldn't be part of such a strange system: take all my work,
> ask for more, make me a peer-reviewer, and pay me nothing. Too strange.


I see the ideal system as ignoring the author/publisher membrane we
currently have, and starting instead from join authorship with
controlled release of drafts to a widening audience. Imagine wikipedia
plus access control (both reading and writing) plus remuneration
aggregation and disbursement mechanisms. I don't see the
centralization/decentralization question as a design question, merely
an implementation one.

Received on Monday, 14 January 2013 21:51:36 UTC