Proposal For New Way Of Scholarly Communication

[sanghyun]

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

[Buffy]

We'll leave this up for a few days before deleting it, but if you don't come back and actually discuss what you're doing, all you've done is demand free advertising from us, which is against our rules and generally obnoxious. Most of the other sites you mentioned aren't predisposed to giving you free advertising either. If you want people to become interested in your product, you need to actually talk about it and draw them in.

 

I say this as a VP of Marketing, not just a forum moderator. This is bad marketing.

 

 

I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains, :phones:

Buffy

[sanghyun]

We'll leave this up for a few days before deleting it, but if you don't come back and actually discuss what you're doing, all you've done is demand free advertising from us, which is against our rules and generally obnoxious. Most of the other sites you mentioned aren't predisposed to giving you free advertising either. If you want people to become interested in your product, you need to actually talk about it and draw them in.

 

I say this as a VP of Marketing, not just a forum moderator. This is bad marketing.

 

 

I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains, :phones:

Buffy

Hello Buffy. I'm sorry my topic sounded like an advertisement.

 

What I am trying to seek here is really just as I wrote, the voice of people in academia. My team is eagerly working to develop a service that would help scientists share their knowledge in a better way relieved from commercial publishers.

 

I'd be happy to have discussion over this topic for a long period with people here.

 

Thanks!