Developing a de-centralized atmospheric science journal

[turtlehurricane]

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) currently has a monopoly on Atmospheric Science publications in the USA and even around the world. In order for your meteorological work to be scientifically accepted it is vital to publish in one of the AMS journals, or somehow get into a bigger one like Nature or Science (but that is quite a rare accomplishment for a meteorologist).

 

I argue that the AMS journal publication system is inhibiting the growth of meteorological knowledge, greatly impeding the flow of scientific ideas, as well as wasting tens of millions of dollars.

 

To begin, it costs many thousands of dollars to publish anything in an AMS journal. If you cannot afford this then you are not allowed to publish, no matter how good your article is. Most publications are funded by the government agency or university the meteorologist works for. This gives governments/universities almost complete control of the official atmospheric science knowledge pool, excluding the ideas of 99% of the world.

 

It is 100% backwards and absurd that authors have to pay to produce content for the AMS. The AMS should be paying authors for their content, like it is in most of the world's newspapers, journals, publications, etc. Rewarding authors for publications would definitely increase the quality of articles too, as people would compete to get the most money and viewership. The way it is now it doesn't really matter if the author's article is mediocre or stellar, as long as it's published it's considered a win. Additionally, the government spent many thousands of dollars on the research for any given publication, clearly the data produced is valuable. A good journal would be motivated to publish valuable data without charging fees to publish it.

 

The AMS does not allow people to view thier articles unless they pay a fee. This isn't a problem for people in the government or universities, but for the general public it is a huge problem. Charging people to read articles in AMS journals massively decreases the amount of people that are reached by the article, I bet there would be orders of magnitude more viewership if the AMS didn't force people to pay. The flow of scientific ideas in the meteorology field is catastrophically inhibited with the current setup, data in new publications rarely reaches the public. It is an insult to the authors that the articles aren't freely shown to members of the public on the internet. The government funded the research to expand public knowledge, yet the knowledge barely reaches the public just because the journal operators want more money.

 

A good journal would charge fees to neither the author or the customer, in order to obtain the highest quality content with maximum viewership. If the AMS journals cannot exist without authors paying and customers paying, then they shouldn't exist. A journal which allows anyone to view articles for free and pays authors would rise to dominance in a free market. Unfortunately as things are the atmospheric science field is not a free market, it is dominated by government institutions, and the AMS has latched itself onto this structure. Scientific ideas that aren't in AMS journals are usually ignored, since those in government institutions and the AMS will tend to lambast non-AMS publications, even if they have a similar peer-review system. Most scientists aggresssively reject for-profit journals as well, since the journal would have an incentive to manipulate content to make money, obscuring the real science.

 

Since the AMS has free reign to do what they want with the publishing system, they have become very inneficient. It takes more than a year to get almost anything published, at best several months even if you did groundbreaking work. This greatly slows the advancement of meteorology, since it takes too long for new results to reach other scientists. During that time other institutions are often working on the same idea, all funded by government money, so ultimately the government wastes a ton of money funding several different scientists to do the same research. And in the end the publication barely reaches the public due to ridiculous demands by the AMS to pay a fee. A one sentence post on twitter often gets more viewership than any given AMS journal publication, which is inexcusable.

 

And that's if your idea even gets published, even with government funding and backing many good ideas get prematurely aborted by the AMS peer review system. Theoretically the system is great, articles are reviewed by people with expert knowledge on the article subject. Unfortunately this doesn't workout so well in real-life. If the expert reads something in your article that disproves their own findings they have an incentive to reject your idea and torpedo the article. The article is either rejected, or the author has to modify the article to agree with the findings of the reviewer, even if the modifications obfuscate the truth. In situations like this things can become overly competitive quickly, the expert in the field can take different results as a personal attack and respond with vigorous agression. This can be worked out by having multiple rounds of review, but it causes a huge delay.

 

In meteorology there is a tendency to attack those with different results, rather than work together to advance science. I believe this problem stems from a lack of funding in atmospheric science, there are too many meteorologists and not enough government or corporate money to go around, not even close to enough. Meteorologists rarely admit they were wrong even when fully disproven with hard empirical data, likely due to sub-conscious fear they might lose funding. Fights between meteorologists can get quite agressive, quickly escalating to personal attacks, which shouldn't happen during scientific debate. Case in point, the National Hurricane Center director was forced to quit since he had a scientific disagreement with staff. http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/09/hurricane.official/index.html?eref=rss_topstoriesThere is a strong urge to discredit others in the atmospheric science field to preserve status and funding, especially if their research is in direct competition with your research, regardless of the validity of the research. The total amount of funding stays the same or decreases each year (mostly due to very slow research progress), so if another institution does great research and obtains funding, that means other institutions lost funding. This makes it very difficult for a new institution or scientist to gain a foothold in the field, attacks will come from those already estabilished.

 

The estabilished meteorological institutions and scientists essentially control the AMS journals, and this is used as a weapon to shoot down research from less estabilished scientists. The ability to control the flow of scientific information gives them a major advantage to maintain funding, while putting others at a disadvantage. Clearly we as a community need to somehow separate the flow of scientific information from monetary concerns.

 

The solution would be a decentralized meteorological journal. The centralization of the current AMS journal system has slowed the advancement of meteorological science to a crawl, it has wasted tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars of government funding. And the centralized nature of the AMS allows certain people to control what gets published. In an ideal world this would be fine, but even in a field like meteorology people can and do abuse their power to increase their wealth and reputation. This abuse directly inhibits scientific growth.

 

How would a decentralized journal work? In order to work it would need to be 100% uncontrolled and trustless. Even if a journal is started with the best intentions, if it is centralized it can be taken over by the wrong people. Essentially anyone could post anything to this journal at any time, and it wouldn't be possible to delete what other people say without their permission. Each person will be able to sign messages using a private encryption key they control, so they can definitively prove they were the ones who posted a particular article or comment. If someone wanted to remain 100% anonymous they can do that too, to avoid backlash from coworkers, other institutions, or the government. This will facilitate the free flow of ideas like never before.

 

New data and discoveries will be instantly posted to the journal, rather than waiting months/years like the current AMS journal system. There would be an incentive to quickly post your idea so you get credit for it. Each user of the journal will be able to comment on each article posted in the journal, in this way a peer review will be conducted. Each and every thought on the subject will be documented, so that the reader understands all sides of the debate. If the original author and a reviewer disagree then both ideas will be visible, rather than the author being forced to modify their article.

 

The history of each user will be easily searchable, so that their reputation can be ascertained when considering their comments. Software can be written to find the most popular articles at any given time. Instead of looking through all the AMS journals for new findings it would be easy to see the most popular and important research at any given time on a single page. Research would become much more efficient, simply search the journal for your topic and you will find every relevant article in history in the same spot.

 

This journal can also be used as a hub for forecasting discussion, the ensemble of scientists would likely produce more accurate forecasts than we ever thought possible. Experts on every single topic in meteorology will be reading and contributing to the same thread.

 

There will be no single location or computer where the journal is stored, instead it will be on each computer which participates in the journal. This will make it impossible for the journal to be destroyed or centralized, as long as 1 computer survives the journal lives on. I imagine a similar system to torrents will be used, where each computer sends data to other computers. All data will be cryptographically encrypted and impossible to change without the correct private key. It will obviously be crucial for every scientist to keep their key safe, I'm sure government institutions will ask for the key from all scientists working for them, but it would be a mistake to oblige. Regardless even the most oppressed scientists could make new accounts and post their real thoughts.

 

One of the major advantages to a decentralized journal is it will be independent of money. The journal will be free to use for everyone in the world with a computer, which would drastically increase viewership of articles versus the current AMS system. There would be no publishing costs, so any author can publish regardless of their wealth or position. It will be impossible for scientists to censor each other in attempts to maintain or acquire funding, giving scientists a more fair chance to be funded if their ideas are worthy.

 

The best part is this journal could be easily created, it won't need millions of dollars to setup or approval from the estabilishment, just a single well-built open source program.

 

Basically it will be a discussion board like AmericanWX, de-centralized like Bitcoin, and would have quality peer reviewed content. If the meteorological community adopted something like this scientific progress will become magnitudes faster, and cooperation would occur like never before. The open forum nature of it essentially forces discussion and cooperation, rather than censorship and coercion like we see today. The key is for it to become a respected hub for publishing data, and eventually the most desired place to publish results due to massive viewership, and also since you can get your results published and peer reviewed within days or weeks rather than months and years. I think ideas would advance so quickly that the funding issues of the modern system would disappear.

[andyhb]

I'm going to be honest here. The whole source of all of these ideas seems to be the fact that you simply can't take criticism when it comes towards you. This literally happens every. single. time. you are disagreed with on this site, nowhere more spectacularly than in that incredibly inane and unnecessary fight in the Russian meteor thread and in multiple previous tropical threads. You immediately start touting this holier than thou and "I know everything and you don't" attitude that no one wants to deal with. If you handle yourself this way in your career, frankly it's no surprise that you were immediately met with stern resistance. Maybe it isn't everyone else with the problem.

[PSUBlizzicane2007]

First of all, AMS does not have a monopoly. RMetS journals are of equal quality.

Second... The process which the AMS had formulated, and which journals throughout the scientific community go by, prevents crap crackpot articles or plagiarized articles from appearing in the journal... These are two of the huge problems with journals from China and some international open source journals of which I have seen with my own eyes.

But if you would like to see just how many journals Atmospheric Science articles are written in, I would advise you to check out the MGA (Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts) database on ProQuest so you can have some idea of it.

[MN Transplant]

Holy moly, that was quite a rant.  I have some insight into this and can respond later, but have you checked out JAMES (Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems)?

[LocoAko]

First off, while I agree that overall access to journals should be increased and is a conversation worth having, I'm not sure the [very large] majority of the public is ever trying to access these articles anyway. The cost issue is another topic that is worth of discussion, but where is the money going to come from to pay publishing scientists? And you don't think rewarding scientists who publish with cash is going to lead to a decrease in quality of published articles? ...

 

Secondly, so if I'm following you correctly it sounds like you'd want to totally do away with pre-publishing peer review? That sounds like a truly terrible idea to me. The amount of crap that would get published is likely off the charts, not to mention plagiarized stuff as PSU said. The point of having to meet a standard of peer review prior to publishing is that readers can know there was, presumably, a certain baseline standard of science in the paper. Of course exceptions exist, but you definitely shouldn't have to read a paper and all of the peer review comments before deciding whether the paper is valid. Open journals like that do exist and serve a purpose but I think it'd be a shame to make most/all publications that way. 

 

To be honest, the rest of it sounds like personal bitterness and unsubstantiated claims and can't really be responded to. I personally choose the optimistic route and believe that there isn't a concerted effort by established scientists to shoot down less-established ones, while acknowledging that scientists are people and unfortunately can let emotions get in the way on occasion. 

[turtlehurricane]

 

 

I'm going to be honest here. The whole source of all of these ideas seems to be the fact that you simply can't take criticism when it comes towards you. This literally happens every. single. time. you are disagreed with on this site, nowhere more spectacularly than in that incredibly inane and unnecessary fight in the Russian meteor thread and in multiple previous tropical threads. You immediately start touting this holier than thou and "I know everything and you don't" attitude that no one wants to deal with. If you handle yourself this way in your career, frankly it's no surprise that you were immediately met with stern resistance. Maybe it isn't everyone else with the problem.

Case in point, immediate personal attack. I don't even know you and don't remember talking to you.

 

This is the norm with meteorologists, just make each other look bad. Sorry but I'm not stooping to your level.

 

Seriously your comment is 100% irrelevant.

[turtlehurricane]

First off, while I agree that overall access to journals should be increased and is a conversation worth having, I'm not sure the [very large] majority of the public is ever trying to access these articles anyway. The cost issue is another topic that is worth of discussion, but where is the money going to come from to pay publishing scientists? And you don't think rewarding scientists who publish with cash is going to lead to a decrease in quality of published articles? ...

 

Secondly, so if I'm following you correctly it sounds like you'd want to totally do away with pre-publishing peer review? That sounds like a truly terrible idea to me. The amount of crap that would get published is likely off the charts, not to mention plagiarized stuff as PSU said. The point of having to meet a standard of peer review prior to publishing is that readers can know there was, presumably, a certain baseline standard of science in the paper. Of course exceptions exist, but you definitely shouldn't have to read a paper and all of the peer review comments before deciding whether the paper is valid. Open journals like that do exist and serve a purpose but I think it'd be a shame to make most/all publications that way. 

 

To be honest, the rest of it sounds like personal bitterness and unsubstantiated claims and can't really be responded to. I personally choose the optimistic route and believe that there isn't a concerted effort by established scientists to shoot down less-established ones, while acknowledging that scientists are people and unfortunately can let emotions get in the way on occasion. 

No, peer review would occur within the de-centralized journal.

 

I've successfully published everything I wanted to publish, but the system is 100% **** as it is. Hopefully other people who aren't biased towards AMS can chime in.

[Ginx snewx]

Interesting perspective and a great thread for intelligent discourse. Already some great insight provided by others ( minus the Andyhb garbage). Will be interesting to see some detailed responses from others who are in your field.  Having to pay per view for AMS articles is a huge PITA but somewhat understandable. Having spoken to many in your field they are in agreement with many but certainly not all of your points. A clique seems to exist at some level and I have to strongly agree with you on the over sensitivity to criticism.

[LocoAko]

No, peer review would occur within the de-centralized journal.

 

I've successfully published everything I wanted to publish, but the system is 100% **** as it is. Hopefully other people who aren't biased towards AMS can chime in.

I'm not biased toward the AMS, I just have no reason to be anti-AMS. That doesn't discount my points. Also, rereading your post, I don't think the Twitter comparison is fair or even a correct one to make.

You've written:

- "Essentially anyone could post anything to this journal at any time"

- "There would be an incentive to quickly post your idea so you get credit for it"

- "Regardless even the most oppressed scientists could make new accounts and post their real thoughts"

- "If the meteorological community adopted something like this scientific progress will become magnitudes faster"

If you can't see how these ideas would be terrible for the science, I can't help you. The goal of published articles is not speed and fame, it's quality science. You also clearly state that peer review would be ongoing/occur after the article is published. Readers of journals should not need to conduct their own peer review (esp. on a subject that isn't their specialty) every time they read a new article in order to determine whether the science is up to par. That's ridiculous. Not to mention that peer review is often a thankless job that is done to better the science being published in a community. Who would waste all of their time reviewing every (potentially awful) article published to an open-source journal like that? Also, who are these "most oppressed" scientists?

 

 

a few quick points from the vantage point of a decade in scientific publishing (terse because I am on my phone):

--the AMS is not holding back science and it operates in the same way as all of the reputable science journals do with a peer review system.

--you would not believe some of the stuff that comes in for publication. peer review works.

--while scientists have disagreements, the editors and facilitators ensure that all known biases are weighed and discarded. I have mediated a few contentious peer reviews and in the end the science won out over the disagreements. and I have had hundreds of potential reviewers recuse themselves so as to not create a conflict of interest.

--if you for some reason think the AMS journals are a cabal, there are other quality atmospheric science journals out there.

--it costs a lot of money to physically publish a journal. electronic publication is extremely labor-intensive. and copy-editing is as well. it's not "type a paper and turn it into a PDF".

--every paper published whose research is solely funded by the U.S. government is free to access across every publication.

and I don't and have never worked for the AMS but I do know some of their publishing leadership and TH is just wrong.

Much better and more succinct than I could've done.

[turtlehurricane]

Well I think the ultimate solution is to get away from money entirely, authors don't need to pay and the journal doesn't need to pay authors. Anyone can view any article for free. No one will be in charge so the journal itself won't be trying to make profits.

 

I have enough faith in the atmospheric science community to think that a completely de-centralized journal would actually produce excellent peer-reviewed content. Of course there would be garbage posts, but those would simply be ignored by scientists, external software can be written to parse through and find good content.

 

Essentially when a scientist posts an article all other concerned scientists/people will post comments, and no comment can be deleted except by the author of the comment. Then the original author takes the comments into consideration and changes the article as they see fit. If someone fundamentally disagrees with the article then they can publish their own article to prove their point.

 

A centralized committee is unnecessary to produced quality meteorological content, and I argue it greatly inhibits the advancement of our science by delaying reporting of new results, human bias and associated censorship, and the need for the centralized committee to make profits. A de-centralized journal eliminates all of these problems.

 

It would be much like americanwx, except more robust and completely uncensored.

[turtlehurricane]

--it costs a lot of money to physically publish a journal. electronic publication is extremely labor-intensive. and copy-editing is as well. it's not "type a paper and turn it into a PDF".

--every paper published whose research is solely funded by the U.S. government is free to access across every publication.

 

 

Online journals produced by the community would have zero costs, it would be a mechanism to get your research into the public view, so people would be motivated to post there.

 

Just a couple examples of newly published AMS articles funded by the government that can't be viewed without paying an insane $35 fee. I think it's horrible that the public can't view these articles after all the work the scientists put into them, and all the money the government spent.

[turtlehurricane]

lol.  that is just a willfully uninformed response.

 

who is going to create the XML for online articles and cull the necessary metadata?

One of the people who helped program the original infrastructure of the open source de-centralized journal would likely create an external search engine. XML and metadata isn't needed at all, but could be added if beneficial. And anyone would have the ability to create their own search engine, or just read the unfiltered content.

[turtlehurricane]

"one of the people".  mmmmhmmm.  will there also be unicorns contributing to this mythical journal?

 

 

this entire proposition is based in near total knowledge of the nuts and bolts.  your solution to a key element of disseminating knowledge is "oh someone will figure it out", and presumably just do all that work for free, is naive at best.

 

have fun storming the castle!

Another benefit is no castle storming is necessary. It can be easily created and once it is no one can censor or destroy the de-centralized journal. I believe it will become popular on its own if correctly designed.

 

A group of programmers who believe in the advantages of a de-centralized journal will be the ones who build it, similar to Bitcoin https://blockchain.info/

 

Bitcoin has given people financial freedom like never before in history, and a de-centralized journal would give people scientific freedom like never before.

[isohume]

Another benefit is no castle storming is necessary. It can be easily created and once it is no one can censor or destroy the de-centralized journal. I believe it will become popular on its own if correctly designed.

 

A group of programmers who believe in the advantages of a de-centralized journal will be the ones who build it, similar to Bitcoin https://blockchain.info/

 

Bitcoin has given people financial freedom like never before in history, and a de-centralized journal would give people scientific freedom like never before.

 

Oh I have no doubt. 

[donsutherland1]

Well I think the ultimate solution is to get away from money entirely, authors don't need to pay and the journal doesn't need to pay authors. Anyone can view any article for free. No one will be in charge so the journal itself won't be trying to make profits.

 

I have enough faith in the atmospheric science community to think that a completely de-centralized journal would actually produce excellent peer-reviewed content. Of course there would be garbage posts, but those would simply be ignored by scientists, external software can be written to parse through and find good content.

2 questions:

 

1. How would journals fund activities ranging from peer review to publication in the absence of sustainable revenue streams?

2. How could software determine what is "good content" if a paper discussed new knowledge?

 

Authors are paying for a service (peer review) that has a lot of value. Peer review can, among other things, lead to new insights, strengthened work, etc., all of which benefit authors and the broader scientific community. Doing so is little different than corporations paying an accounting firm for auditing services.

 

Even as advances have occurred in artificial intelligence, software is nowhere close to being ready to supplant the rigor of peer review. Such knowledge-oriented work may even be beyond automation, as one isn't dealing with routine, recurring decisions.

 

I may be wrong, but I'm not aware of any current or imminent alternative that can provide comparable value to the present peer review model. It's also highly unlikely that the federal government would underwrite the costs of peer review and journal publication so as to render subscriptions, etc., unnecessary.

[turtlehurricane]

No funding of any sort will be required for a de-centralized journal. Scientists would post articles to spread their ideas to the world, and other scientists will review the articles by commenting on it or making their own article.

No one is paid to post on americanwx, yet lots of quality content is posted and debated. I want to see that on a much larger scale.

Unlike americanwx which has server costs, there will be no infrastructure costs for a de-centralized journal. Each computer participating in the journal will facilitate the transfer of data, and it will be almost unnoticeable to each user.

There is no easy way to determine good content, and it's subjective so said software would not be in a de-centralized journals code. People can write their own software to find relevant or popular content, and to filter out spam. The raw output of the journal will be completely unfiltered though. Will likely be necessary to have the external software ready around the time the de-centralized journal is released, to protect from spam attacks.

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[MN Transplant]

So much room to cover.  Going to go bullet-style to keep it concise:

 

• AMS is a main player in the atmospheric science publishing world, but certainly not a monopoly.  The Royal Society and AGU (JGR, especially) are also big time, along with the headline journals that you refer to.
• AMS spent $6.876M on publications last year.  Maybe you think that is too much, but the alternative of $0 is a nonsensical solution.  Where is the revenue stream to pay authors?  How is this at all akin to a free market when you are also decrying the potential sources of funding (fees to publish, fees to gain access)?
• Most of the articles have a 2 year exclusionary period before they are free to read.  This keeps the incentive for individuals and institutions to continue to subscribe to access the latest data.  I think there is a push to reduce that number, but as don says, something has to give on the sources of revenue to keep the journals going.
• Journals are not the only way that findings are disseminated.  Meeting presentations & posters, seminars, and other low-key efforts continuously take place.
• The main funding agencies are generally quite aware of what else has been funded in a certain area of research.  Many times there are groups looking at the same topic from slightly different angles.  That doesn't mean that they both aren't valuable. 
• The peer-review editors aren't idiots.  They generally know when reviewers are not being impartial.  They don't have to blindly follow whatever is sent back.
• I'm trying to figure out who is getting wealthy by holding back atmospheric science research

On the new journal idea

 

• I think it would be a complete mess without some sort of gatekeeper. 
• What if the community doesn't want to spend their time peer reviewing every thought that people have?  Right now it is hard enough to get reviewers for papers, but they acquiesce partly because they know that they will be publishing and do not want to look bad to an editor.  Without a push, who is going to spend all of their time reviewing?
• This is even more of a problem with your proposal "most popular" idea.  Who is going to review the less popular topics?  It is really easy to get the community excited about the latest MJO/ENSO/Hurricane paper, while there are probably less people looking at the numerical techniques behind the latest boundary layer parameterization.

[turtlehurricane]

who is going to pay for the hosting, the server, the software, system maintenance?

I covered this in the post just before yours: "Unlike americanwx which has server costs, there will be no infrastructure costs for a de-centralized journal. Each computer participating in the journal will facilitate the transfer of data, and it will be almost unnoticeable to each user."

Software will be produced by those who believe in the principals of a de-centralized journal. No one will be paid. After it is produced there will be no maintenance costs, maintenance and upgrades of the code will be created according to a community consensus, and the fundamental backbone that makes the journal de-centralized will be impossible to edit.

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[turtlehurricane]

So much room to cover. Going to go bullet-style to keep it concise:

• AMS is a main player in the atmospheric science publishing world, but certainly not a monopoly. The Royal Society and AGU (JGR, especially) are also big time, along with the headline journals that you refer to.
• AMS spent $6.876M on publications last year. Maybe you think that is too much, but the alternative of $0 is a nonsensical solution. Where is the revenue stream to pay authors? How is this at all akin to a free market when you are also decrying the potential sources of funding (fees to publish, fees to gain access)?
• Most of the articles have a 2 year exclusionary period before they are free to read. This keeps the incentive for individuals and institutions to continue to subscribe to access the latest data. I think there is a push to reduce that number, but as don says, something has to give on the sources of revenue to keep the journals going.
• Journals are not the only way that findings are disseminated. Meeting presentations & posters, seminars, and other low-key efforts continuously take place.
• The main funding agencies are generally quite aware of what else has been funded in a certain area of research. Many times there are groups looking at the same topic from slightly different angles. That doesn't mean that they both aren't valuable.
• The peer-review editors aren't idiots. They generally know when reviewers are not being impartial. They don't have to blindly follow whatever is sent back.
• I'm trying to figure out who is getting wealthy by holding back atmospheric science research

On the new journal idea

• I think it would be a complete mess without some sort of gatekeeper.
• What if the community doesn't want to spend their time peer reviewing every thought that people have? Right now it is hard enough to get reviewers for papers, but they acquiesce partly because they know that they will be publishing and do not want to look bad to an editor. Without a push, who is going to spend all of their time reviewing?
• This is even more of a problem with your proposal "most popular" idea. Who is going to review the less popular topics? It is really easy to get the community excited about the latest MJO/ENSO/Hurricane paper, while there are probably less people looking at the numerical techniques behind the latest boundary layer parameterization.

Why did you just post all this content without being paid? That answers your question regarding how this is possible with no funding.

The fees to view an article cause a massive decrease in viewership and spread of scientific ideas, by orders of magnitude. It also increases the imbalance of knowledge between the wealthy and poor.

A de-centralized journal would be a compliment to conferences and paper publications, the scientists using the journal can organize any event or external publication. This de-centralized journal will co-exist with and enhance other mechanisms to spread and debate ideas.

I worked in the government for 10 years, and was funded for 15 years, and I saw far too much duplication of research due to delays in publishing and lack of community coordination.

Currently editors of centralized journals can abuse their power to keep or acquire funding, and this is a problem since funding for atmospheric science is quite limited.

You just posted a detailed review of my article without any monetary incentive, even though you disagree with most of the article. This same behavior is what will facilitate peer review in a de-centralized journal.

Reviewers go slow due to the centralized nature of journals, they fear they won't be chosen again as a reviewer if their review isn't good enough or controversial. In a de-centralized journal everyone gets to be a reviewer without any fear of falling into disfavor with the journal.

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[turtlehurricane]

right, unicorns and rainbows.

also, how are you going to handle copyright issues? copyright infringement? spam? joke papers?

I suppose you believe bitcoin is unicorns and rainbows as well?

As I said in the original post, each author will have a cryptographic key which can be used to sign messages, so it would be easy to prove if you are the original poster of content.

Spam and jokes can be filtered out with an external program. Anyone can design any filter they choose and parse through the raw output of the journal.

Copyright infringement will be handled externally in the courts, and no user will be censored for copyright infringement

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[turtlehurricane]

reviewers go slow because they are busy scholars with families and professional lives. and it's totally wrong to assert someone won't be chosen as a reviewer if they don't write controversial reviews. that's simply untrue. and yes, reviewers are expected to write competent reviews, unless by "good" you mean something else.

I already have 5+ reviewers on this article less than 12 hours since I made it. I believe peer review will be stronger than ever before in a de-centralized system, every person can post their ideas and contribute to the process of publishing scientific data.

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[turtlehurricane]

this has nothing to do with bitcoin.

and how are you going to handle the issue of copyright? fairies and stardust?

Bitcoin is a de-centralized monetary system, meaning it is trust less and gives users complete freedom over their funds. A de-centralized journal is in the same spirit as bitcoin.

Like I said, courts can handle it. Copyright infringement will not be censored by a de-centralized journal, no one is in charge and no one can be held liable by the government due to cryptographic anonymity. And the government can't destroy it either since it will exist in every computer that participates.

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[LocoAko]

I already have 5+ reviewers on this article less than 12 hours since I made it. I believe peer review will be stronger than ever before in a de-centralized system, every person can post their ideas and contribute to the process of publishing scientific data.

Sent from my iPhone

Because people calling out your unsubstantiated talking points on a forum during their lunch break is in any way comparable to a rigorous peer review process of data and methodologies?

[turtlehurricane]

It is most definitely peer review, and everyone is allowed to give their view. I have enough faith in the meteorology community to believe rigorous peer review can be done without anyone in charge.

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[turtlehurricane]

rainbows and unicorns for everyone!!!

you don't understand the first thing about this. repeating "decentralized journal" like a mantra won't solve future legal problems.

The government wants to get rid of bitcoin but it is simply impossible due to its design, likewise a de-centralized journal couldn't be destroyed or modified regardless of legal rulings. Legal issues will simply not be a concern, which will increase the flow of ideas.

I can tell you want me to get into a flame war, but I will not stoop to that level and hurl insults and red herrings at you. The unicorns comment on every post you've been making is detrimental to your content.

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[turtlehurricane]

it's not peer review. but if we pretend it is then we've uncovered a flaw in the stardust system: reviewers with far more factual and practical experience with the scientific publishing process have critiqued your hypothesis, uncovered numerous factual errors in your assumptions, raised significant questions about your methodology, pointed out serious legal pitfalls, and have given you fact-based reasons for calling your conclusion unfounded and wrong. and your response? "rainbows and unicorns for everyone will fix the problems!!!"

it's essentially an idea for a vanity press for people whose scientific research can't successfully transit the peer review system. it tastes a lot like sour grapes.

It's for everyone, but the disenfranchised and poor of the world will certainly find it useful and beneficial. It will level the playing field.

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[a5ehren]

Bitcoin is currently in the process of collapsing under its own weight, with the blockchain already being several gigabytes of data for the relatively low volume of transactions being processed. 

 

The only reason people are willing to take on the load of downloading, distributing, and verifying the blockchain is because they get paid (an ever-decreasing amount of) money to do so. 

 

The people in your system would have no incentive to take on the distribution of an exponentially increasing amount of modeling data that would go along with the papers, so no one would do it.

[turtlehurricane]

Bitcoin is currently in the process of collapsing under its own weight, with the blockchain already being several gigabytes of data for the relatively low volume of transactions being processed. 

 

The only reason people are willing to take on the load of downloading, distributing, and verifying the blockchain is because they get paid (an ever-decreasing amount of) money to do so. 

 

The people in your system would have no incentive to take on the distribution of an exponentially increasing amount of modeling data that would go along with the papers, so no one would do it.

This post is uninformed and ignorant of reality. Bitcoin has only been gaining strength, despite immense pressure from governments and banks to get rid of it. The entire blockchain is several gigabytes, for years of data. That's pretty damn good, and the data volume can only increase linearly due to blocksize limits.

 

 

[turtlehurricane]

yep--increasingly published papers come with huge data drops that have to be hosted somewhere.  in a system without a gatekeeper there is no way to ensure those data drops are always available, secure, and/or unmodified.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding what I'm saying. The entire journal will be stored on each computer which uses it, that's the only way to ensure it is always available, secure, and unmodified. The program is the gatekeeper.

[biodhokie]

many of these data sets are too large to be stored on a home computer or in a personal cloud. 

 

 

Correct and not every lab wants to have to spend a thousand dollars for a NAS system everytime a new paper pops up with a new data set in a decentralized system. AMS happens to be the Science magazine of the Meteorlogical realm.

 

The processes they put forth ensure the quality of articles adhere to some sort of standard and they don't actively force other journals to shut down publishing articles.

 

Really the only point worth nothing is the public availablity of scientific results after a set point in time. Eventually data shouldn't be hidden behind a paywall if the article is over X years past initial publication. Otherwise all the other points are just part of dealing with academia.