>What am I missing about the benefits of the status quo keep it so entrenched?

The entrenchment is due to perceived (and cultivated) prestige, less so about tangible benefits. Prestigious journals have good brand value, they spend money cultivating it and they extract earnings from it.

Researchers and administrators trade on journal brand value for career advancements. They benefit from a highly prestige-stratified journal catalog as a tool for differentiating themselves from their peers, it's much easier to justify a promotion based on 'X publications to prestigious journal A, B, C' than 'bunch of people in the community think this is a great result', especially to a non-expert.

I still think that "Journal of the MIT AI lab" or "Tokyo University Official Journal" would have no problem in establishing prestige if they were to try it.

I think you're probably right. However, I wonder what sort of retaliation the first institution to do this might face from publishers. The publishing industry will have a mighty incentive to kill it and they tend to play hardball.

Unless some sort of millionaire / billionaire (Thiel / Musk / Bezos, i.e. one of guys the hated by HN, just kidding) will be behind this open-source journal.

This is good for blockchain...

In all seriousness, I have always thought that Blockchain could pose a good solution for the issue of peer-reviewing scientific papers. It provides a descentralized infrastructure with "tokens" that can be transferred to provide "prestige" to papers and authors.

Well, I’m not sure about “prestige”; it seems like another arbitrary metric to be gamed.

However, I would like to easily see a non-political db where you can easily track the paper graph to figure out which papers are based on discredited research and/or researchers taking money from special interest groups.

Any (specific) idea how to get to that data? I might be interested in including this with some other, more general information-flow model{s,ing}. This part seems like making it publicly available would be a good thing, and possibly necessary, and likely aligned with the goals a likely choice of organization to host/maintain the technology would have.

i'm moderately hopeful that we'll get that sort of querying for free* as the semantic web matures, and we can better query federated linked data. university libraries are pretty keen on making that dream a reality (and this is the sort of use-case that makes them want to be able to do that, though they'd probably pitch the rosier version, where they show the indirect impact of a well-regarded paper or study, because that sells better than the doom-n-gloom version described here, even if that version is just as important).

* or if not "free", a very small marginal cost, in terms of say data aggregation and programming effort

...right, but then you have to figure out explicit metrics for determining what "prestige" is, and you have to explicitly implement the mechanics of it. i think this is a worthwhile research project of its own (or many research projects). but the mapping is very much non-trivial. i think the amount that people complain about how poorly the usual social media ontology ("friends", "likes", etc) maps to the "real"-world equivalent shows that this isn't something were you can just be like "we'll implement a first-pass of the blockchain thing now, and we'll refine the granularity of our prestige tokens later". thanks, but no thanks.

which is all to say, like so many of the things people want to use a block chain for, the hard part is the politics and the real-world nuance, not the immutable ledger. the immutable ledger is not trivial. but compared to the other stuff, it's not all that hard (and is certainly more solved, at this point).

You should cite "A Proposed Currency System for Academic Peer Review Payments Using the BlockChain Technology". Abstract here: http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/5/3/19

I think this is one of the rare cases where blockchains can actually provide good values: we could potentially get third parties of trust eventually to make a blockchain unnecessary but for now, the established parties are unethical and entrenched.

I hope this publication gets an implementation soon.

There are already serveral projects trying to solving these problems.(https://pluto.network)

I don't follow. What problem would blockchain be solving here that couldn't be solved without it?

Instead of prestige it would be nice to see successful replications.

That works for experimental stuff, but a lot of work is theoretical. Consider most of mathematics or theoretical physics. There is no real replication here. Instead, the test is strong peer review, combined with publication to a wider audience.

Similar issues occur for review articles, which are about analyzing data already present rather than analyzing new data. Moreover, this would also hurt actual replications. It kind of seems like being the last to replicate something would be without compensation.

Why not use a centralized karma system like hacker news does?

because then you wouldn't get a chance to say "blockchain"

You could call it hn blockchain, but only if you paint it mauve...

The way to think about this is an article in Nature is like winning a tiny Nobel prize, with no prize money. You can make whatever other sensible publication outlet you like, but it's hard to create something that has the prestige of winning a tiny Nobel prize. That's Nature's value proposition. Brand, history and exclusivity.

This is why you can't get too angry at the scientists who continue to publish in it. If you kill yourself to figure something out worthy of a tiny Nobel prize, are you really not going to claim it? It's not like claiming that tiny Nobel prize is gonna hurt the dissemination of your work. The higher profile of your work will easily compensate for the fact people have to jump through a hoop to read it.

This is why I love sci-hub. It just destroys the hoop. It doesn't need to figure out how to replace the brand, history and exclusivity of publications like Nature. Along with government-mandated open source laws, it's one of the only realistic ways to actually disrupt this industry.

I don't think Sci-Hub breaks the loop. Researchers still need to publish with the mini Nobel prizes to advance their career in a highly competitive field, and governments/funders still don't want to dictate where researchers get to publish their work, so in effect, what happens is that governments mandate Open Access and pay the same old publishers significant (and disproportionate) amounts of money to make the single articles they fund openly available. In other words, the costs of research still don't go down, and the government-mandates were happening without Sci-Hub as well...

At the university I'm at, every time the library dropped its subscription to a particular journal there used to be a strong backlash from academics at the university.

Since sci-hub, the library has been able to drop a bunch of journals and for some mysterious reason none of the academics seem to give as much of a shit anymore. Obviously, no-one has no idea why..

That's basically how major journals got started, long ago. Most were essentially not-for-profit. But then, since the 70s, they've been acquired by large publishers. And those new owners have been monetizing those journals' prestige and market share. Given the inertia of the academic community, they've had a long run at that. But the end is coming, I think.

The Guardian had a great longread describing that history: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

And I'm afraid that, even though a lot is changing, the disproportionate monetising isn't yet done for.

Universities could be in conflict of interest - organizing review of competing (or worse its own) research

Just as with the established journals, organizing it isn't that influential and relevant compared to actual editorial board; and it would be likely or even expected that the board of a publication organized by some university would have just a couple members from that university and dozens of respected scientists from outside.

It's generally not considered conflict of interest, as the boards transcend single institutions and their members tend to be individuals in the stage of career where their individual reputations that matter more than the reputation of the institution they "represent".

They already are organizing conferences, which for some fields is a major way of sharing research so it wouldn’t be a problem.

Isn't the peer review process blind, anyway? University affiliation would presumably be one the scrubbed fields, no?

The process is blind, but it's fairly easy to know who the author is just due to the topic at hand. At least for specific subfields.

Agreed. Within my own field, there are less than 10 people who are presently working on the same topics as I do. Consequently, we are constantly asked to review each other’s papers, and it is pretty trivial to tell who the author is, either because of the views and interests shown in the paper, or because of language use (i.e. you can tell that the author is a native speaker of the language in which the paper was written, or from their unidiomatic skills in it you can often guess at their native language).

The hard part in this is remaining silent and pretending you don’t know anything about this, when you meet your peers at conferences.

It is not blind for most science fields (I was not aware of any that were blind before reading this. PhD in Earth Science). What fields do you know of where journals send out papers for review with the author and his/her affiliation removed?

I've seen it exactly once (in a numerical analysis journal). Authors were blacked out. This was undermined almost immediately when the authors wrote in the introduction "... following previous work of the present authors [1]...".

Even if all these clues could be effectively removed, the nature of the research work, tools used, writing style, all unambiguously indicate authorship to someone in the field. I think for this reason double-blind review is not popular.

Which is not to say that it would be great if it were possible...

Nature offers a double-blind option for peer review: https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/peer_review.html?&$N...

See the "anonymity" section.

Whether peer review is blinded depends on the field. Some of the major ML conferences like NIPS are blinded, but in general most journals are not. The reviewers see the authors and affiliations and the editors see everything.

Many fields are small enough, with infrequent enough papers, that experts will be able to tell the author from style and content alone...

Blinding is not as effective as you'd think: http://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2017/10/31/the-fractu...

A lot of people want to do exactly this.

The problem is that changing an existing culture that is deep in everything how this system works is difficult. This goes way beyond the mere question of publication, it's still pretty common to hire people based on high impact factor journal publications etc.

You're faced with a system that's controlled by the people who made their career in this system. They're not the most qualified to improve the failures of that system. Changing it is possible, but it's hard and it's a slow process.

One hopes it will change faster than the typical "one a death at a time".

Well, the Open Access movement has been going at it for more than two decades now, so don't get your hopes up...

(That said, it's definitely not like nothing has changed! There's a lot changing at the moment, and it's not quite sure what the system is going to look like. Traditional publishers aren't looking too bad yet, though.)

Why not adopt the legal profession's approach and have grad students operate the journals? I.e. Harvard Law Review?

The academy is a primary example status quo and gatekeeping. Any change to the system is risky to them.