Peer Review Simulation Project
What is this project?
The purpose of this project to use the resources of the internet, trust based social networking, filtering, and advertising to simulate the services provided by peer review journals. The intent is to use these tools to provide all those benefits without a central hierarchal control, but rather horizontal methods.
What is the purpose of this wiki?
This wiki is intended to be a place where people in the community, i.e., scientists, coders, and other interested parties, can discuss and learn about this project. Participation in this project is intended to be as open as possible, from actual implementation to comments and criticism. This is to be a community effort intended to provide a service to the community.
Project Details
The arxiv is an excellent place to publish papers. Distribution is also taken care of and its freely available to all. The only problem is its hard to distinguish what papers are worth reading since they haven't been reviewed. This can be taken care of in part by the community, by allowing members to make comments or ratings. Comments, however, are tedious for the reader since the reader must manually filter through comments to determine which ones are worth reading. Rating systems have their own problems. What journals provide what these schemes do not it an understanding of who is worth using as a referee. Editors know experts in the field of a papers subject. However, this is not secret knowledge. Experts of a field are well known to the community. So what we need to do is use the communities knowledge of experts to filter content for us. This is the scheme I had in mind:
1) Give users tools for creating social networks: Allow users to set up user bios and user pages Allow users to form groups Allow groups to maintain membership, manage rules, maintain a group page, bios (I want to note that its the groups job to control membership. ie, if there is a UNM Qphys group, its up to the group to make sure that all the members in the group actually correspond to people in the real group. That's their choice of course, but it helps maintain authenticity for others. Also groups can be groups of groups (quantum infor groups of the US, etc))
2) Allow users (and groups) to make pages for their papers This would basically be a dedicated page for the paper which would contain a link to the arxiv in addition to comments on the paper by other users.
3) Allow users to make comments on the paper Here we allow *any* person to make comments. You can break these comments into several sections: general comments, errors, criticisms, general discussion, etc.
4) Allow users to assign trust to persons and groups (bios function). Here, the user can depend on their social network to make these assignments, or they can be manual by the user. Basically you allow the user to pick who in the network they listen to. This could be as closed as the people in their groups or as open as anybody. In addition you can give them additional tools to alter the sphere of trust: trust everyone your group members trust, trust by a connectivity measure, trust by some other algorithms or ratings, etc. Our job would be to provide them with the most effective tools for doing so.
5) Allow users (and groups) to promote papers. Here you would basically let users give shoutouts to papers they think are important. People can filter what paper advertisements they see, and trust groups are one way they could filter it. They can apply other parameters and several independent filters if they wish (tools). In addition to shoutouts, you can broadcast your "top 10 papers", "headline nominees", etc. Also I think you should be able to shout out people you think others should trust and let receivers manually add those people into your trust network (if not present already).
I believe that all these would effectively simulate many of the benefits derived from journals. Being interested quantum info, I would include all quantum info groups in my trust group and probably teveryone 1 level trust from my trust group. In addition, I would include other groups: other well known physicists, my friends, maybe some other quantum groups, etc. I might also cut out people I felt weren't worth listening to. (I feel its important to mention that would maybe apply some stochastic variable so that I dont close myself in, but this may not be necessary because my social network may be enough to add some stochasticity.) I go to my user page and I'm "advertised" papers (and top tens, trust nominees, etc) by my trust groups. Keep in mind that I can assign whatever filters I want, in fact several different ones, to filter what ads i see. That could be trust based, but can also be: filtering all papers that don't have anything to do with quantum info, all papers that are too old, all papers that don't come from a specific group, specific person, whatever. I visit those papers and I see comments only by people according to different filters also: trust group, citees, high rated comments, suggested comments by trust group, manually, etc. I am then free to add my own comments on the paper, other comments, apply ratings, etc.
