We need a taxpayer funded PDF host similar to arxiv where all taxpayer funded research gets published, and if journals want to license the content to publish themselves, they pay a fee to the official platform. It'd cost a couple hundred grand a year, take ~3 people to operate full time. You could even make it self-funding by pricing publishing rights toward costs, and any overflow each year would go back to grants, or upgrades.

It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere.

It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.

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bondarchuk a day ago | parent | next [-]

I think the big missing thing in any proposed or actual fully open system is it does away with the difference between "prestigious" and "non-prestigious" journals. "Prestigiousness" is actually a really useful signal and it seems really difficult to recreate from the ground up in an open and fair system. It's almost like "prestige" can only emerge in a system of selfish/profit-motivated actors.

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bee_rider a day ago | parent | next [-]

It is a kind of fuzzy signal though. Maybe a better replacement could be found. Like, if we all had PGP keys, we could just sign the article that we like, right? Then, a web-of-prestige that more accurately represents the field could be generated. ORCID could manage it, haha.

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bondarchuk a day ago | parent | next [-]

Well, yes, this is exactly the kind of well-intentioned technical solution that just will not work at all when it comes in contact with human nature. "Oh boy my paper got accepted in Nature!" vs - "oh boy some people on the internet signed my pgp thing!". Just not the same.

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bee_rider 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean… if somebody famous in your field signed your paper, you might be excited. Reviewer #2 is just some anonymous figure.

	▲	bondarchuk 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think the difference is with a journal like Nature people are competing for strictly limited real-estate. The famous academic could still sign however many papers they like..

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warkdarrior a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Publishing collusion rings would greatly enjoy using this web-of-prestige: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-massive-fr...

	▲	bee_rider a day ago \| parent [-]
		Those already occur though. I wonder if we could form a graph that would make a collusion ring intuitively visible (I’m not sure what—between papers, authors, and signings—should be the edges and the nodes, though). Making these relationships explicit should help discover this kind of stuff, right? Another problem with my idea is that a lot of famous luminaries wouldn’t bother playing the game, or are dead already. But, all we can really do is set up a game for those who’d like to play…

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observationist 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Prestige, in an honest system, would be a great signal. The problem is with any sort of closed system, the signal immediately gets gamed. Therefore, the open system is the least bad of the available options. A journal could still achieve prestige by curating and selecting the best available studies and research - in the proposed system, nothing is preventing them from licensing material like any other potential platform or individual.

Profit motivated exclusivity under private control resulted in the enshittification vortex of adtech doom we're currently all drowning in. If you want prestige - top ten status in Google search results - you need to play the game they invented. Same goes for all of academia.

People stopped optimizing for good websites and utility and craft and started optimizing for keywords and technicalities and glitches in the matrix that bumped their ranking.

People stopped optimizing for beneficial novel research and started optimizing for topical grants, politically useful subjects, p hacking, and outright making shit up as long as it was valuable to the customers (grant agencies and institutions seeking particular outcomes, etc.)

Google is trash, and scientific publication is a flaming dumpster fire of reproducibility failure, fraud, politically motivated weasel wording nonsense, and profit motivated selective studies on medical topics that benefit pharma and chemical companies and the like.

Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen different incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the resulting publications.

It's incredibly cheap and easy to host for free. It benefits everyone the most and harms the public the least to do it like that, and if a prestigious platform tries to push narrative bending propaganda, it can be directly and easily contradicted using the same open and public mechanisms. And if it happens in the other direction, with solid, but politically or commercially inconvenient research saying something that isn't appreciated by those with wealth or power, that research can be openly reproduced and replicated, all out in the open.

	▲	bondarchuk 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>The problem is with any sort of closed system, the signal immediately gets gamed. I agree, but.. >Therefore, the open system is the least bad of the available options. this does not necessarily follow. >A journal could still achieve prestige by curating and selecting the best available studies and research See, this is just the kind of thing that I think will just not work when organized top-down like that. "Oh, we'll just make a prestigious journal by only letting the best papers in" - everyone could say that, but what would induce the authors of the best papers to submit them to your specific journal at all in the first place? Currently it's the fact that it's already prestigious, and this reputation has grown over many years through informal social processes that are very hard to codify. >Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen different incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the resulting publications. Of course I agree, just to be clear I am a great proponent of openly accessible science - just think the prestige thing is an interesting corner case.

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abhisuri97 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

this is pubmed. Most papers that are funded by NIH research are available on pubmed if the main publisher gives access to the full text (after some set embargo period...usually around a year).

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warkdarrior a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It'd be flooded in seconds with millions of AI-generated articles. arXiv is already suffering from this.