So, I recently reread Faster than the speed of light. By the way, I highly recommend this book (even if it’s central theory is wrong), if for no other reason than for it’s explanations of relativity and cosmology. But anyways, a large hunk of the book is Joao’s fight with the scientific publishing world to get his theory even published. The thought that just occurred to me was that someone needs to apply the hard lessons learned in internet social media, especially aggregation sites like Slashdot, Reddit, and Digg, to scientific publishing.
The idea goes like this: a working definition of what, say, physics is, is that it’s what physicists do. It’s not perfect, but it works, and it’s much easier to measure. So you have this site, and you can get an account if you’re a physics researcher at an accredited research institution (this is answering the question “who is a physicist” by plugging into the existing infrastructure of defining who is a physicist- accreditation). Having an account means you can do three things- upload papers, vote on papers, and comment on papers. Everyone, including the public, can see all the papers that have been uploaded, and their comments, but only accredited physicists get to upload papers (if you’re not an accredited physicist, you have to get at least one accredited physicist to upload your paper- the papers the physicists upload don’t have to be theirs- they’re just claiming that they consider the papers to be physics). And they’re time stamped so that priority is preserved.
Once the paper is uploaded, physicists can vote for them. Each physicist gets only one vote per paper, and every month the N papers with the top number of votes which haven’t already been published get published in the paper journal. And yes, the votes accumulate, so a paper that’s been slowly garnering a vote a month for the last five years (and thus has 60 votes) beats out the paper that got uploaded yesterday and has already garnered 59 votes (although that paper will likely make it next month). There might be an English major on staff to make sure everything is spelled correctly and is grammatical, but that’s optional.
I might allow down votes (allowing physicists to say “this paper isn’t physics, or isn’t worthy of being published”), but they would only count in the case of a tie (if two papers both have 100 up votes, and only one can be published, publish the one that has fewer down votes). You might also have multiple journals, and allow the physicists to vote on which journal a paper should be in (“This paper really belongs in the Journal of String Theory, not in the Journal of Loop Quantum Gravity” for example).
I would make the list of who voted, both for and against, various papers public, for two reasons. First of all, this helps discourage people from engaging in personal vendettas, or at least makes it more obvious that they do, and second, this allows the heavy weights to influence the selection process (“if both Leonard Susskind and Stephen Hawking are voting for this paper, that’s good enough for me!”).
This is a couple of weeks of work for a competent Ruby on Rails hacker. The biggest coding problem will be handling the multitude of different file formats the papers will come in (word, latex, etc) and making them look more or less uniform. The real problem will be marketing to the physics community itself. Physical Review D is an important journal to the physics community because a lot of important papers are published there, because a lot of important papers are submitted there, because it’s an important journal. Everyone buys IBM because everyone buys IBM. Except everyone doesn’t buy IBM anymore- change can happen.
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