j-pb 9 hours ago | next |

While I welcome any efford towards open science, it's extremely frustrating that most of these effords are done by people with very little technical merit.

At best it's librarians with very little compsci background, at worst it's entrenched organisations trying to deepen their moat.

Many organisations in this space that burn through millions of funding each year, could individually be replaced by a hash-function, an ed25519 signature, or BitTorrent.

There are a few people that truly want to change things, even in the upper echelons, but they are stone-walled by a behemoth of public and academic mid-level bueraucrats that try to keep things as unchanging as possible.

RandomThoughts3 9 hours ago | root | parent |

The issue is not a technical one. At the heart, it’s entirely about reputation and governance. Who is behind the open access effort and how they organise it is more important for the credibility of the whole effort than how it’s technically done.

I’m fairly sure that the technical costs are pretty much incidental here. It’s not like publishing was a particularly new endeavour.

j-pb 7 hours ago | root | parent | next |

I disagree.

You don't need organisations that assign hierarchical unique identifiers in the form of DOIs if you just identify papers based on their hash.

You don't need publishers to verify identity via centrally assigned ORCIDs if every scientist can just sign their papers with their self generated public key.

You don't need proof of publication at a specific time via a journal, if you have a bunch of publicly available nodes that can notarize your papers hash with a publication timestamp.

You don't need peer review, if you establish a culture of rebuttal and confirmation papers that use the previous infrastructure to form a web of trust, where every scientist can see an individualy computed trustworthyness score for every paper that they read, based on the transitive trust of the peers that they personally deem trustworthy.

You don't need long term archival at libraries and journals, when you have a decentralized distributed hash table, where public institutions and individuals can contribute storage space to store blobs of papers and scientific data, that can be retrieved by their hash.

We think too small compared to what's possible. And we completely ignore the attack vectors that the current non-cryptographic identifiers, systems and institutions have.

The issue is only a political one precisely because established players don't want to give up their power or even learn new ways.

dbingham 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The problem is that ultimately, all those efforts are building software - whether open source or platforms. And few of them are building it very well. The user experience of the vast majority of these efforts is abysmal and it undermines whatever other credibility the organization might have.

User experience matters. And for that, you need people who have experience building software with a high bar for user experience.

thomascountz 9 hours ago | prev | next |

For those interested, all researchers involved in projects or grants funded or co-funded by the European Commission (as well as staff of European Commission agencies) are eligible to publish. Only original research that hasn't been published and is not under consideration by another venue is eligible. See the list of eligible funding programmes on their site.[1]

For readers, all published articles will be available on Google Scholar and indexed in the standard bibDBs.

Of particular interest to me are the guidelines for submitting a Software Tool Article[2].

[1]: https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/about/eligibility/

[2]: https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/for-authors/articl...

vinni2 9 hours ago | prev | next |

I wonder if research communities would be able to switch from publishers like ACM and Elsevier.