Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat of major publishers and platforms having an improper influence on how scientific knowledge is accessed—or outright suppressed. Infrastructure we rely on must be built in the open and on interoperable standards, and hostile to corporate (or governmental) takeovers. Universities and the science community are well situated to lead this fight.
Are you familiar with nostr? It seems like a good place to publish scientific papers, but maybe there’s a reason no one has done so. Maybe the nostr protocol needs to add a new spec for scientific papers or something
For all I know, Nostr is a kind of social network with distributed identity.
The problem with publishing elsewhere is not that it’s hard or can’t give you reach.
It’s the scientific metrics dictating your readership, job prospects and essentially your entire scientific career. Not only your ratings are affected, but also ones of your institution, so you have to play by the rules to have a job.
For your publication to count, it needs to be published in journals listed in certain international indexes such as Scopus and Web of Science. These indexes are, in turn, corporate-owned (by Elsevier and Clarivate, respectively) and the respective boards are free to reject (and certainly will reject) your independent publishing source.
Sounds hard to solve. Maybe we need hobbyist scientists who get their income in a different way and just publish studies wherever they feel like, or something
I’d say a noncommercial, maybe UN-backed index that is widely recognized would help.
Also, journal format is extremely outdated. We need to reform the way we store scientific data, and create an international standard.
Honestly, if my career didn’t rely on it, I would entirely skip the publishing part of science. It takes so much more work to communicate your findings than to make them. Of course, that doesn’t help the cause since no one else will be able to build off of my work if I don’t share it.
DaVinci notebooks style science work 🔥