Proposal for a New Way of Scholarly Communication

[sanghyun_pluto]

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

[tar]

sanghyun_pluto,

I am not a researcher, however I have a daughter that researched for a university.  Her work was financed by grants from government and private sources.  Her work was already shared with the world through publication in worldwide periodicals and the peer review process is already alive and well.   Both the university and she, have patent rights on her discoveries.

There are financial realities surrounding research and our system of reward and our protection of intellectual property is already a substantially thought through and vetted process and established ways are already in place to handle both the reward and sharing aspects of your proposal.

Personally I am cautious of having certain information available to enemies.   South Korea is our friend, and sharing is mutually beneficial.  However someone has been sharing technology with North Korea, and they have built nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, nerve agents, biological weapons, ways to defeat our electrical grid and internet and communication infrastructure and any number of other ways to hurt us, that we are not aware of.

If there was no political strife in this world, your proposal would be worth considering, but as it is, not knowing who is on the other end of the transmission, makes it hard to share knowledge, indiscriminately.    Knowledge is power, and should not be freely shared with someone who wants to hurt you.

Regards, TAR

P.S.  I did not open your link, as I do not know who you are or what your motives are.   I do know you wish to bypass official governmental and societal checks on information getting into the wrong hands, so your motives are already suspect to me.  You are anti-capitalist, but ownership of information is crucial to me.  I want my friends to be fully informed and my enemies to be deprived of the information they need to hurt me.   Your proposal is dangerous on its face.  I don't need to delve into the details.

[sanghyun_pluto]

13 hours ago, tar said:

sanghyun_pluto,

I am not a researcher, however I have a daughter that researched for a university.  Her work was financed by grants from government and private sources.  Her work was already shared with the world through publication in worldwide periodicals and the peer review process is already alive and well.   Both the university and she, have patent rights on her discoveries.

There are financial realities surrounding research and our system of reward and our protection of intellectual property is already a substantially thought through and vetted process and established ways are already in place to handle both the reward and sharing aspects of your proposal.

Personally I am cautious of having certain information available to enemies.   South Korea is our friend, and sharing is mutually beneficial.  However someone has been sharing technology with North Korea, and they have built nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, nerve agents, biological weapons, ways to defeat our electrical grid and internet and communication infrastructure and any number of other ways to hurt us, that we are not aware of.

If there was no political strife in this world, your proposal would be worth considering, but as it is, not knowing who is on the other end of the transmission, makes it hard to share knowledge, indiscriminately.    Knowledge is power, and should not be freely shared with someone who wants to hurt you.

Regards, TAR

P.S.  I did not open your link, as I do not know who you are or what your motives are.   I do know you wish to bypass official governmental and societal checks on information getting into the wrong hands, so your motives are already suspect to me.  You are anti-capitalist, but ownership of information is crucial to me.  I want my friends to be fully informed and my enemies to be deprived of the information they need to hurt me.   Your proposal is dangerous on its face.  I don't need to delve into the details.

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

[tar]

sanghyun_pluto,

I may have misunderstood your intentions.  My concern was with how you would decide on the remuneration in value or reputation.  If this is done by a central deciding body, then you are back in the centralized power situation you started with.  Which I believe is crucial to the operation of a system.  There has to be, for instance, on this board, a group of moderators that are making sure that the rules are followed and no one is abusing the system or other members.  Whose bank account is reduced when the bank account of the researcher is increased?  You mentioned blockchain and I thought this was like bitcoin, which takes incredible processing power (wasteful) and has facilitated the creation Iof a darkweb in the U.S. where drugs and porn and weapons are bought and sold outside the view of the public or the authorities.  

It seems to me, that trust is the most crucial element when sharing information with others.   When you write a check you trust every person and institution involved, that they will be honest stewards of your funds, and get them to who you promised the funds.  There are records of all transactions, and people responsible for mistakes and omissions.  The law addresses all types of occurrences, including theft and fraud.  No such checks and balances are available with bitcoin.   You cannot go up to a wrongdoer and put handcuffs on them and take them away.

I have for 20 years been hoping that there would develop on the web, a crowdsource type vetting system on all material found on the web.  A way to give your approval or disapproval of a site or fact but it is not so important what I think of a thing, as it is what do the people with the most at stake, related to the thing, think about the thing.    And we have private companies and associations, and countries and political parties that all have competing goals, where it is crucial to know what affiliations a peer has, so you can understand who or what that peer is responsible to.

So I would not be too quick to bypass the structures of power that have already developed in this world. I think we are already cognizant of the need to help each other and share information, and this is already done by governments, associations, universities, companies and organizations like Wiki.

 

With the proper checks and balances.  

The wild west is not the best model for how we should share information.

Regards, TAR

 

However, I would be interested in helping to develop a signature a peer could use, when commenting on research that would include the date and the reputation of the commenter and the level of expertise in various fields.  I have some ideas along this line.

Edited November 8, 2017 by tar

[Mordred]

I read your white paper, the goal is applaudible I wish you well in it.