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

On 14 January 2013 18:58, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Perhaps an endorsement system can be handled using linked data to increase
your web reputation.  Maybe we can also pull in things like a bachelors
degree or phd as part of the reputation.  I picture a world where people
cultivate their digital footprint and also use it as part of web scale
payments, e.g. to increase confidence in a trade, or as part of issuing
personal currency (which is currently done via a bank loan, this can be
delegated to the web).


>
> 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/
>
>