I am afraid that gatekeeping is partially essential and somewhat desired, as an academic you don't have time to read everything and some sort of quick signals, albeit very flawed, can be useful to stop wasting time reading crappy science. If you don't gatekeep you will get a lot of crappy papers or papers that mention the same thing and it will waste more time from people that wish to get a quick sense of the state of a topic/field from quality work. An open source voting system would be easily abused, so it will end up to be trusting a select service of peer reviewers or agencies. Especially if a paper includes a lot of experiments and figures that can be somewhat complicated or overwhelming. What do think?

Are you aware of the current efforts by researchers on Bluesky to build a new researchers platform on ATProto? (Forget the project name at the moment)

If not, same handle over there, I can get you in touch with them. Or hit up Boris, he knows everyone and is happy to make connections

There's also a full day at the upcoming conference on ATProto & scientific related things. I think they com on discourse more (?)

• crimsoneer

  yesterday at 5:33 PM

  Ooh no, please do, but would love to hear more!

  • verdverm

    yesterday at 5:42 PM

    Go chime in and share your work here: https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/about-the-atproto-s...

    That'll get us connected off HN

    I think Cosmik is the group I was thinking of that has also put out some initial poc like yourself

• Johnny_Bonk

  yesterday at 5:36 PM

  id also be curious to follow this if you have any links or resources

  • verdverm

    yesterday at 5:42 PM

    This is probably a good jumping off point

    https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/about-the-atproto-s...

@criomsoneer: Check out Open Science Network (Bonfire), they are also doing interesting work in this space! https://openscience.network/

Integrate them peer review process and you’ve got a disrupter

• mlpoknbji

  yesterday at 7:13 PM

  Peer review should be disrupted, but doing peer review via social media is not the way to go.

  • perching_aix

    yesterday at 8:04 PM

    Has a bit of a leg up in that if it's only academics commenting, it would probably be way more usable than typical social media, maybe even outright good.

• crimsoneer

  yesterday at 6:33 PM

  Right? This is kind of the dream.

• naasking

  yesterday at 7:14 PM

  Calling it peer review suggests gatekeeping. I suggest no gatekeepind just let any academic post a review, and maybe upvote/downvote and let crowdsourcing handle the rest.

  • staplers

    yesterday at 7:27 PM

    While I appreciate no gatekeeping, the other side of the coin is gatekeeping via bots (vote manipulation).

    Something like rotten tomatoes could be useful. Have a list of "verified" users (critic score) in a separate voting column as anon users (audience score).

    This will often serve useful in highly controversial situations to parse common narratives.

Yes publishing is broken, but academics are the last people to jump onto platforms...they never left email. If you want to change the publishing game, turn publishing into email.