๐ณ๐ฑ
I have been thinking about writing a webapp that would enable QOTO to become the first "open, distributed, scientific journal".. I am still thinking about how I am going to go about it but the idea would be a scientific journal that anyone, regardless of credentials or pre-approval, can submit articles and peer-review and ultimately the acceptance or rejection of an article will happen without a centralized authority.
In all liklihood acceptance will be "fuzzy" in that it will be up to the reader to decide if the groups which approved of the article through peer review have sufficient credentials that you trust them. So the key will be in designing a way to make that work.
Ideas are welcome of course.
Thats a big part of it.. people should be able to know
1) what peer-reviewers have either liked, or criticized in the paper.
2) what peer reviews were acted on and what changes were made
3) What the credentials, accomplishments, and past publications or peer-review the person has done
navigating this as an aggregated web of trust so users dont need to be knee deep in it would also be nice.
Also, never deleting a paper but at worst labeling it as debunked and showing the above reasons why.
The key is opening up the process both to reduce the friction for people who want to contribute, and to make the process transparent so any end user can judge the credibility from all the facts.
It means you as the user can choose to trust someone directly (as a reviewer or publisher or whatever).. or you can also choose groups of people to "meta-trust"... for example as a user I might decide I want to add 5 points of trust to anyone who has a PhD from MIT, or anyone that that Bill Nye thinks is cool.
Basically there can be curated lists of people and you can choose if you wish to trust those lists or not, even as they change. If you dont like it, then you dont have to trust lists at all and can just evaluate each person yourself.
I don't know hat you mean here but I don't like the sound of it. Trust is the first precondition to betrayal.