Comment by pms | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pms | Hacker News Reader

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I think that there should be something like SO (Stack Overflow) for scientific papers, with anonymous user-generated reviews and ratings of the papers, and reputation being acquired by the users, both based on papers and their reviews. I wrote 'anonymous' because it's a more heavy-weight business than posting and assessing questions about coding. To avoid the situations when scientists get angry because of bad reviews, and try to revenge on their reviewers, it should be at least in the first years anonymous. The reviews would be voluntary, and also would be rated, just like answers to question in SO. I am a scientist, and I know that reviews have very low quality because of many reasons, such system could perhaps help improving the reviews, while keeping the reviewing process automatized, and reducing its cost to the minimum. In fact, costs of storing papers are low (Arxiv), reviews are free (nobody pays to the scientists anyway, they do it for the community and reputation), and the only cost that is high is the cost of managing the reviews. But if reviews could be automatized then we have a system that is as cheap as Arxiv is, and peer-reviewed :)

In the long run I see such system emerging and being successful, and eventually replacing everything else. Needless to say it will take a lot of time though to popularize it.

What do you think? Could this be done?

Refereeing papers is an odious chore that you only do to get your back scratched in return in the future. (They call it "giving back to the community", but it's really a protection racket.) You can't replace this with a voluntary system.

Why not, if you would get reputation points for it? The idea is to review the papers which you want to read anyways, or perhaps you have already read them and you want to express your feelings about these papers, hopefully in a way useful to other viewers of the paper. Nobody tells you to do it, so you do it by heart, this surely would increase reviews quality.

Well, maybe this could work, but probably it would have to replicate the "coercive" component of the current system. In other words, by reviewing other people's papers you somehow improve the chances of having your own papers reviewed. And if somehow that system manages to also provide an incentive to do the job thoroughly, then that would be a huge improvement on top of what we have now.

Coercion comes from the employers (tenure/promotion requirements) not from the publishers.

Well, the coercive component is the unified reputation that you gain in this site, just like the reputation that you gain in SO. Obviously, the higher reputation you have, the more recognizable you are and more people read about what you do.

I think that could be a successful community, you just have the same problem as any social community, finding users. Especially ones of interest that are open to publishing anonymously and listening to anonymous reviewers.

The real tragedy is the general reference, social science, and humanities journal diaspora where the usage and demand has skyrocketed with the increased access online resources allow to lay researchers. The science journal communities are way ahead in self-sufficiency in adapting, and are increasingly open to the corrupt state of publishing and alternate community publishing platforms.

I think SO is the wrong model and that Hacker News is a better one. There's already reputation/badges/etc for the sort of academic tasks you're describing: look at any CV (eg: conference presentations, referee assignments, etc, and the obvious one is journal publications). So I don't see how replacing the old system with the old system plus usernames is an obvious improvement or a necessary evolution.

I'm way more interested in informal discussion of interesting papers and news than anything else.

As everyone else has mentioned, the big issue is getting a large community. So what would be really cool would be to figure out how to do something like HN or SO without active involvement by a large community. In my field there's a lot of discussion/review/etc of working papers and published results, but it's all scattered across different blogs and commenting systems. Plus papers build on each other and some are clear replies to other research. If you could take that sort of dispersed discussion and put it into an HN or reddit style threaded view that was available at one spot (or an SO style question and answer format, if you prefer), that would be awesome.

edit: typo

There are a few websites already trying to do this, but as with all networks, it only works if you get enough users.

Could you give me examples? Thanks!

ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net/) and Academia.edu (http://academia.edu/) are two examples of companies looking to build networks for academics.

Arxiv and marxiv are already working on this.

Arxiv even has a paid fellowship, but it is postdoc wages, not professional wages.

Sounds really good. Could you link me to some material about this?

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