Comment by vishnu_ks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vishnu_ks | Hacker News Reader

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In the current industry the authors are required to publish papers in the most reputed journal rights for maximum rewards. The more reputed a platform becomes the more power does it have. So it's totally upto the people who runs the journal to change the rules one day if they decided to make more money. They can easily change the license of the new papers that are waiting for review and the authors would still have to publish in the journal because of it's reputation. They can also theoratically censor the articles or authors that they don't like. On the other hand this can't be done for an application for example running in Ethereum. Once a smart contracts is deployed there is no way to modify it.

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 :)

Ok, your last paragraph is the most interesting, because it makes me think that I'm not sure how exactly you imagine this working, and maybe I'm missing important details. I'd love you to explain a bit further how this will work - who is paying whom exactly, etc, to make sure we're on the same page.

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?

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