sanghyun_pluto

tar, Thanks for your kind comment. I think my communication skills are still too bad to deliver our core values. Neither I nor my team is anti-capitalist. We are not trying to deny Capitalism here, but what we really want to say is that the current Journal system is neither efficient nor effective. If the current system is putting much of the necessities in the value chain of disseminating information around researchers right now, it would be perfectly fine that they make profit out of the system. One might argue, why would researchers use the current system when they actually do not have a critical role? I would say, or lots of academics has been, is, and will be saying , they're using the current system because it helps them find more opportunities. They publish in high Impact Factor journals, and they are likely to have tenure chances. But many academics say that totally doesn't make sense. Impact Factors do not show the value of individual papers, but is a simple aggregation of those in a journal. Research outputs, or the researchers who created it, better be evaluated by its own value. Or if we had a better indicator of that value, it would be great to use such. But NOT impact factors. Thus we're proposing an alternative way to build such indicator to evaluate researches, why not assess them collectively? Currently most journals put around 3~4 reviewers for an article, determined by the editor of the journal. Why not ten, hundred, or thousands of peers in the same academic field? Still we're not insisting that every researcher should have one say per one person in evaluating, like democracy. It's one say per one reputation. If some researchers had built more contributions and performances for a long time in his field than others, it's perfectly fine for them to have more influence. But why don't we do it with all the people in the same boat, not just secretly selected 3 random guys? It's just like what your signature is saying. None of us know better than all of us put together. The thing we aim to make also has nothing to do with weapons, wars, nuclear, politics, or diplomacy. It's more about knowledges on those fields, and how they're shared. We don't want them to be strictly open to anybody, like you're concerned, but we want them to be controlled by the one who contributed to build that idea. We don't want any transmission happen without knowing who's at the other side. We want everyone to know what they're doing with whom, and refuse to do if they believe it's wrong, which must be decided on behalf of their own, not by the intermediary publishers. Lastly, it's OK that you didn't open the links, and it's actually good thing that we never open a link on webs without knowing who posted that. Medium.com is one of the mostly used blog services in the world, and I believe you don't need to be worried click on that

Hi all. I’m Sanghyun Baek from Pluto.Network, a team in South Korea developing a decentralized application (DApp) for Scholarly Communication (ScholComm) with the aid of blockchains.Basically we plan to establish a NON-PROFIT foundation to innovate the ScholComm space. I’m posting this to introduce our core concepts, explain the current stage, and get some feedback on it. If you already well recognize the need of decentralizing current journal system, skip the rest and read the design document linked at the end of this post for the detailed design of our concept.The background is very straightforward. Current ScholComm system is an Owned Business. And we believe it should be a public good. Decentralizing it will reap lots of benefits to the way academia collaborates to advance the knowledge.The most significant change will be transparency. Owned businesses earn profit from unbalanced information. It is their nature not to disclose any information relevant to their business unless necessary. Transparently available data in ScholComm will open up a way to lots of solutions.Openness is another trait to be achieved, especially in the process of peer reviews. Current way of closed review systems where editors solely determine the reviewers to an article doesn’t really make sense when the boundaries between disciplines are blurred in thesedays. We’d rather want the process to be left to the wisdom of the crowd.At the same time, the system will be reasonable. Lots of researchers believe they do the peer reviewing works for honorary reason. But why is it thought to be honorary when the intermediaries, i.e. commercial publishers, get billions of dollors from it? The system further doesn’t make sense as that “honorary” works aren’t properly credited as their contribution to the ScholComm in most cases. A better system will well incentivize the researchers in either economic rewards or academic reputations, or both.We aim to solve the problems in ScholComm and achieve these properties by creating a platform for ScholComm with a open-public review process and compensation mechanisms. Scholarly contents are shared & evaluated in a decentralized manner, and based on the transparent records of them, compensations are given in both economic values and academic reputations, within an automatic protocol agreed by the community. This reputation in particular has an important role, a weight on the intent of individual researcher on the platform. In other words, the review process is “the weighted wisdom of the crowd”.Again, you can find the detailed explanation of our review process design with some examples and considerations in the design document, and if you find the description on backgrounds, problems, and how to solve them in this post insufficient, please refer to the whitepaper on our homepage. Note that, though, the chapters describing our solutions in the whitepaper is outdated and being updated right now.I’d really love to hear what researchers think about our concept and designs. Feel free to reach us on any of our channels, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Medium, and please subscribe to our mailing list from our Homepage to support us.Oh, and lastly I would appreciate for recommendation on any other spaces like this where I can reach academics for this kind of discussion. I’m posting this same thing on scienceforums.net, thescienceforum.com, scienceforums.com, and the official slack of sciencedisrupt.com. Homepage: https://pluto.network Design Document: https://medium.com/pluto-network/review-process-on-pluto-29c3331d2737