Replying to Account deleted

Let me expand a little on what I see as being the main problem. Peer-review is a weapon. It can be run for hire (many peer reviewed paper did not even have a methodology section, research on the matter shows) it can also be used ill intentionally to censor.

Again, Nostr offers the possibility of reimagining the peer review system. Filtering is absolutely needed, but the mechanism should be distributed and incorruptible.

Maybe a pre-print needs to pass many community layers before it can be considered a published article. Maybe here as well aggregated trustworthiness can play a role over time. Maybe a degree of randomization is needed.Maybe we should reconsider what a published paper is for….

Is it to achieve status via publication? Is it to meet quota and maintain position in a research center or university? Is it to serve the needs of the sponsor? (big pharma I am looking at you)

Or should a published paper be about moving forward collectively and advertise the people doing the work so that they can get funded? About helping fostering a spirit of collaboration where verification rewards the individual, the research and the collective effort.

The web was born out of the desire of collaboration amongst particle physicists. Tim and the people who helped him at CERN (even if he claims otherwise, nobody helped him and ooops the archive was lost and he needed to rebuild it manually) wanted to improve collaboration, decentralize research. But, everything was victim of governmental funding, and lack of belief.

The truth is that W3C is probably been hijacked by Google (possibly one of the reasons Tim left). The web is corrupted to the core… Nostr offers the potential of fixing that.
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Maxim 2y ago

The idea of decetralized publishing (or better to say decoupled from greedy publishing houses like Springer) has been circulating in the science community for a while. arXiv and bioRxiv have solved many problems, but not all. There have been good attempts to decommercialize the scientific publishing business, for example, the eLife journal. But also eLife is slowly drifting to the conventional publishing scheme and has changed its publishing strategy and fees several times already.

The major problem here is how to verify a scientific publication. I very much like the analogy to #bitcoin mining where a network of clients (scientists) would submit their manuscripts (transactions) to publishing agencies (relays), with the latter initiating a decentralized review process (mining) and finally appending it to the global knowledge database (blockchain). But to me there seem to be two large obstacles:

(1) Who is going to validate those? In the bitcoin universe, you as a user don't need a specific expertise to validate bitcoin transactions or to solve cryptographic hashes to have a chance to win the block reward. Some computer knowledge is of course needed, but the validation/mining is done by soulless machines. And it's a very objective thing — no misunderstandings, no ambiguity. The question is then: How can we formulate a mathematical problem such that its solution corresponds to verifying a scientific claim? It’s absolutely nontrivial.

(2) How do we make this new publishing system self-sustained? Again, in the bitcoin universe, this is achieved by block rewards to the one solving the cryptographic puzzle correctly. Would the same scheme work in science? How do we ensure the system is not misused to mine rewards insead of validating scientific arguments?

All in all, the question that you raised has immense importance in my opinion. Despite (1) and (2), trying to approach this ideal is definitely worth working on it.

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Account deleted 2y ago

Tough questions my friend. But, as you mention worth exploring.

Indeed, decentralizing money is the easiest feat, it’s a fairly simple ledger with printing money and collecting fees as incentive; and it was not an easy feat.

That’s why I ponder so much on trustworthiness without really finding a solid answer.

For financial sustainability it is easier for me to think in the context of education as an industry or music and film distribution as I have a better grasp of how the end product can be sold, and then work backwards from there to imagine fair reward of added value into the human chain.

With research, funding in itself is the cause of the problem. So, I would need to better understand who already fund research, why, how do themselves get the money to do so and then offer them a way to continue to do so without corrupting the new process, but also consider what funding can look like when the non scientific community comes in contact with research goals, crowdfunding based on non scientific communication on the research, but with direct funding channel.