Architecture of a Decentralized Publishing System - (i)
The Internet revolution never truly arrived in scientific publishing. Instead, an old system that was functional in its time was scaled up in a largely cargo-cult manner, producing today’s grotesque, dysfunctional, and extraordinarily expensive publishing ecosystem.
Most scientists tolerate this absurdity because they are insulated from its costs. First, they learn to accept the dysfunction as the inevitable “cost of doing business.” Second, universities pay the subscription bills, so individual researchers working there rarely feel the price and paywalled gatekeeping directly.
I already wrote about about how the old publishing system was simply scaled up during the Internet era. The scientific societies were gradually replaced by journals and editorial boards.
Scientific societies had a strong incentive to protect their honor and reputation. Their journals were part of a scientific community they themselves belonged to. Commercial journals are different. An editor may be a dedicated scientist, but the labor of him and unpaid reviewers ultimately serves a business interest. We replaced institutions built around scientific reputation with businesses built around extracting value from scientific labor, and then pretended that nothing fundamental changed.
Flaws of the Current System
Before looking into how a better system can be built from ground-up, here are some of my specific complaints.
- It is nearly impossible to track the publications of individual authors. Google Scholar is probably the best option, but it does not provide the papers themselves. Instead, you are left chasing papers scattered across the Internet with some freely available as PDFs, some hidden behind paywalls, and others simply inaccessible.
I remember that, in the early days of the Internet, many scientists created personal websites and posted PDFs of their papers. Journals promptly harassed them for “copyright violations” as if making publicly funded research actually accessible were an offense.
- That brings me to copyright law. Philosophically, copyright exists to protect authors: when someone spends years writing a novel or textbook, it makes sense to give that person ownership of the resulting work.
Scientific publishing is fundamentally different. Scientists generally receive no payment for their papers. Journals nevertheless use copyright law to control and monetize access to research that is often publicly funded. This is an abuse of a law designed to protect creators. Neither the scientists who produced the research nor the taxpayers who funded it receive a penny from the resulting paywall.
- My biggest complaint about the system is that it failed spectacularly during both the ENCODE saga and Covid. Politically favored papers moved fast through the system, whereas those challenging the status quo were delayed. That is anti-science in the name of science.
Fresh Thinking
I always start with this question - if the current system for sharing scientific results did not exist, what would the scientists like to build? I think they would take the best ideas from various online tools and sites in existence - github, substack, wordpress, reddit, stackoverflow, etc.
Some thoughts -
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The system needs to have a clean break from current model, just like the internet was built with a clean break from the phone companies. Maybe the specifications can be discussed through a method similar to RFCs.
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The system needs to be long-term viable.
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The system needs to be politics-proof.
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The system needs to be liberal about accepting contributions with protections from spams, hoaxes and other harmful content.
Decentralized Honor Societies
I am thinking about a two-layer system with the base layer accepting a large volume of papers, and a second-layer providing the role similar to the honor societies of the older days. For example, a small groups of researcher working on a topic can create a topical “journal” as a layer above the base system. This is the new honor group, and its reputation will be based on the quality of papers it selects.
Such “journals” can choose to review papers before accepting them. Regarding review method, I am wondering whether a public (online) talk would be one possibility. By this time, the paper is already posted in the base system, and a “journal” layer is deciding about accepting it. A presentation will serve both the purposes of allowing the author promote his work and the members of honor society vet it.
The same paper can be accepted by multiple honor societies (interest groups). This will be equivalent to cross-posting of blog posts.
Code and Finances
Whether the new system will make or break will be decided by two factors - code and finances. I will talk about them in a later post.
