> I hope to see the downfall of scientific publishers during my lifetime.
whoa - all scientific publishers or just closed-access ones?
whoa - all scientific publishers or just closed-access ones?
Still, would it be so bad?
The original purpose for html and www was to improve sharing of science papers. I can pretty easily imagine what the world would have to look like for all science papers to be self published and shared globally.
One possible alternative that seems easily viable would be to replace the network of independent publishers with a MediaWiki site that only allows posts from scientists. That could possibly also have a bot running around marking all articles with a peer review status. Talk pages would also make a great place to conduct such peer reviews.
The idea would be to translate everything on Sci-Hub from PDF to MediaWiki and convert all of the references to links. That could be tough, probably loaded with edge cases. If it works though, not only would Sci-Hub be hosting all the papers but this site could make them all easy to find/navigate. Seems like it'd be super fun to go spelunking through a network of related science papers in a similar way to diving Wikipedia.
As an open-source project, it would also be possible for anyone to re-host the site in case it gets blocked.