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Comment by Morendil | Hacker News Reader

This is well intentioned but possibly aimed at the wrong target - the publishing part is not where things are locked down in scientific publishing, it's the indexing part.

Roughly, as I understand it, a researcher's annual performance review is based on the number of papers accepted by the "right" journals, and in turn what determines the "right" journals is their standing with the big science citation indexes such as ISI and Scopus.

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It sounds like you saying the indexing services are the problem? I don't think that's the case. The citation indices can give you a rough idea of a journal's clout within their field based on how frequently their articles are cited. That's (at least arguably) a reasonable way of measuring prestige. Obviously, authors want to be published in the top journals in their field, which also makes sense. We're not specifically trying to disrupt any of these practices.

If you aren't specifically trying to disrupt that, then what ARE you trying to disrupt? Authors are still going to target prestigious journals first and work their way down if they can't get into the top.

OK. Let's just say that as a potential user of your product, I have a relatively good idea of what's wrong with academic publishing in my field and of how I'd like the world to look once these problems are solved.

Given my specific issues, he citation indices are a bigger concern to me than the publishing portion. If you can address my concerns I'll probably end up using your product. It looks interesting enough that I'll probably give it a test drive anyway.

I'll try contacting you off-HN if you're easy to find.

I don't think it's the wrong target. Being a chief editor has a certain prestige, and many prominent scientists start their own journals (usually in specialized areas that are not crowded). Of course, the whole point is to give a better alternative to editors and scientists, "and they will come". Impact factors will follow, it's not like NPG and Elsevier have a lock in them.

Right. Impact factors are a pretty objective metric. While the journals covered in a citation index are a matter of editorial discretion, that's not really where the problem is. For example, the Web of Science sold by ThomsonReuters indexes many high impact journals that are published by its competitor Elsevier. If a journal consistently gets lots of citations, all the major citation indexes will include it, no matter if its open access, or published by a competitor's company. If they neglected to, their citation products would become useless and the company would lose subscribers to the indexes that did a better job.

Would it be possible to disrupt a citation index though? Surely they have access to a huge number of journals and a certain standing themselves...

notable efforts to do so include Google Scholar and CiteSeer

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