* Nobody can manipulate the reviews as everything is stored in Blockhcian.
* Nobody can start asking for money one day suddenly as the whole thing runs on a smart contract and once a smart contract is deployed there is no way to change the code.
* The articles are not stored or controlled by a central server.
I'm not sure I fully understand (or buy into) Blockchain, so forgive me for probing further on this, but: I'm still not sure how blockchain is helping here? Can't you get the same results by just publicly publishing the articles with an open license? That's kind of how things work right now in open-access journals (or with something like StackOverflow, for that matter) and it works fine, what is blockchain adding here? There are tons of copies of StackOverflow's data running around in mirrors, they are (or it's easy to do) hashed for a crypto signature, so you can't just change their text on people. No one can ask money for the answers because they are licenses CC.
So what is Blockchain adding to this? As I understand it, what blockchain provides is most importantly an incentive mechanism, to make people actually donate the PC time to store things (iiuc), but it seems to work fine in popular cases without having the incentive mechanism (e.g. StackOverflow), and I'm guessing if it isn't popular, then just cause it's on a blockchain doesn't change anything and no one will bother storing it?
But again, I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about, so I'd be more than happy to be corrected.
The other argument is modifying the text. I don't think dumps of data running around like that of StackOverFlow doesn't help much. Many sites have got heat for modifying the user comments or reviews in the past. The average person who is using a site is not going to go through the reviews and the dumps of data and see whether anything has been modified or not.
StackOverflow makes money by storing the questions and answers. Thats the incentive mechanism. Also none of the users gets a portion of the money that they helped them to make. I am not sure whether this is the greatest example. One can easily write a smart contract that will facilitate the transfer of money from writers to reviewers without the need of any central server. The amount of money the reviewer gets would be a function of their reputation. So it would be in the best interest of the reviewer to produce high quality work and high quality reviews. A far as the storage is concerned one can make use of Ethereum or a general purpose blockchain for building this. You would have to pay for the storage(reviews, ratings etc) only once and the nodes in the network would make sure that its their for ever. The research papers can be stored in IPFS due to their large size. The files can be seeded by anyone. If the research paper is popular it would be always available. If it is not popular the author or the university can still seed it as its in their best interest. I don't think it matters much where the PDF file is stored. It can be in a central server run by University as well. So this is not a big issue.
Does that makes any sense? Feel free to correct me as well :)
That said, let me address some of your points: > In the current industry the authors are required to publish papers in the most reputed journal rights for maximum rewards [...] They can also theoratically censor the articles or authors that they don't like [...]
I agree with all of this, and would love for the system to change. But this is basically orthogonal to the blockchain - it only requires everyone to decide to give more prestige to whatever new entity replaces it, whether it runs on the blockchain or not. Furthermore, the blockchain does not fix any of the incentive problems by itself (again, unless you imagine something I'm missing here). Specifically, even if everything moves to the blockchain, if it ever loses prestige, then people won't want to publish there anymore, and we're back to square one. And the existence of new, open-access journals (and things like Arxiv) prove that you don't need the blockchain to solve this problem - it's completely an incentives/economic/etc problem, and the tech here is incidental.
> I don't think dumps of data running around like that of StackOverFlow doesn't help much. Many sites have got heat for modifying the user comments or reviews in the past. The average person who is using a site is not going to go through the reviews and the dumps of data and see whether anything has been modified or not.
Well, yes, but the average user isn't going to be downloading the entire blockchain, or running algs to make sure nothing was modified, either. But in fact you can find dumps of the Stack Overflow data, and they're probably hashed, so someone could always prove what was the original content, even if the "central entity" here (Stack Overflow itself) decides to one day try to censor something.
> StackOverflow makes money by storing the questions and answers. Thats the incentive mechanism.
Not, really? I mean, sure, they store things, but in terms of money, they make money by selling advertising, job listings, etc.
As I said before, the other stuff you wrote is a lot more interesting, but I'm not sure I'm getting it - who is paying money here, or another way to say it, how is money getting into the system? Right now, publishers make money, and afaik, the reviewers and the contributors mostly don't. I'd love to fix that too, but, how does the blockchain help to do that? And specifically, what does it do that I can't replace by building the equivalent of a Stack Overflow for publishing?
Blockchain's innovation is to allow a group to come to a consensus about a change that happened, that doesn't allow one person to later say "no no I meant something else". I.e. no double spending.