Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
One model is that of the so called open-access journal, where articles are made available online for free and fixed costs are supported by ads and by charging relatively high fees to prospective authors who submit articles for review.
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Wouldn't charging the authors fees tend to discourage sharing research?
I'd like to see a kind of linked reputation system that could be used across sites. Example: Kovidgoyal writes an article and submits it to an online repository. Yvan reviews the article and thinks it's quite good, and rates it. I have a high respect for Yvan's ability to rate such articles, and I've configured that in my article-searching account, so Kovidgoyal's article starts to percolate to the top of my review list. (It's not necessary that I know Yvan's identity for this to work.) Then NatCh reviews the article, and he has some criticisms about some aspect of the analysis. NatCh is also on my reviewer's list, and the article sinks a bit. (Meanwhile, our favorite hack author, Joe Blowhard, reviews the article and completely pans it, but my review tracking system ignores his rating completely, despite the incomprehensible fact that many other people in the system have rated his reviews highly, because I think he's full of hot air and I've removed him from my reviewer list.)
A "journal" in this case could consist of a site run by a specific editor, who picks reviewers to rely on for a particular topic, and selects articles from the results, offering a hand-picked list. Editors could also get reviews and ratings in such a system.
I'm pretty sure this would work for fiction, but I'm still thinking through how it could work academically.