Since we're on HN, we get to take off our technical hat and put on our product hat -- not the fit-to-customer product, but disrupt-the-industry product.

What are the incentive structures that would destroy this or make it work?

Consider the scenarios today...

- What's wrong with the thousands of similar-sounding journals popping up on China publishing research that is either unvetted or copied from other journals, so researchers can satisfy their publish-or-perish needs?

- How do you deal with reviewer networks?

- How do you get the best of the best, people with no time and plenty of opportunities and money, to provide effective feedback on an avalanche of articles?

- How do you get the support of, without being dominated by, the big research companies and universities?

- Look at the history of reputation systems, from quora to stackexchange to games, on a matrix with the difficulty of determining correctness of questions:

-- Who won the game?

-- Does this code work?

-- Which library should I use?

-- Is this paper correct and valuable?

- What about prediction markets, which try to use money/investment as a measure of seriousness: how would that help or hurt? (and isn't that what we're doing by insisting academics publish for tenure?)

In the spirit of MVP, you might consider a pivot to a much smaller problem: how to professional groups establish and document their standard of care? A team wiki? (gets stale, disconnected from operations) Run books? (too stepwise to convey meaning needed to transform the system) Slack-capture? email? documentation?

What about capturing the benefit in a change of format, from opaque text/pdf to something like a per-domain semantic web, with connections to empirical methods and findings? That could provide incentives for everyone. Like the professional-group scenario, the killer feature would be something that grows incrementally with multiple authors (as code does for developers).

Often they do - quite a lot of stuff is open access. The biggest issue with getting people to read scientific papers is the demonization of those who actually do it. A lot of papers are terribly misleading so the moment outsiders start engaging with the literature they conclude a lot of science is junk, and when they act on that they're immediately attacked as "science deniers" ... by the sort of people who don't read papers, because they are convinced they don't need to.

Getting more stuff as open access will only accelerate the decline in trust in science, by allowing more people to see what's going on behind the curtain. That is not necessarily an issue, but just so you're aware of that - it isn't going to lead to lots of people suddenly basing policy on scientific papers. It's going to lead to a lot of scientists getting defunded.

Automated reviewer matching won’t be good enough to find decent reviewers.

I would suggest partnering with people in very specific disciplines who want to break away and establish open access journals, but want to focus on the editor and review process rather than the logistics (which you provide).

If the authors disagree with the journals team, or just get tired of waiting, they can still publish at any time just like with community review. For authors who choose both, the journal's team and community reviewers can interact with each other just as in normal community review.

I think it's a way to provide a stepping stone for people from the existing system towards full community review and would provide logistics to those organizing open journals with teams of high quality reviewers.

The plan is to implement it during the closed beta period. I would welcome feedback on this concept as well :)

I suck at naming - Peer Review was a working title intended to be somewhat tongue in cheek (similar to StackOverflow). But... because I suck at naming, it is, of course, a little on the nose. So far I haven't come up with anything better.

To toss a few names in the hat, off the top of my head: - openresearch - colab - openjournal - stud.io

Probably collect a few ideas and run a small survey for the initial audience

May I also suggest you consider the network layer centralization. When you mentioned Github+Stackoverflow, I got the point even before I visited your site.

However, even as you think about an alternative on how we publish, consider that technical questions can have significant political consequences. I am of the view that centralized networks are a major contribution to the situation we find ourselves in today. Distributed/Decentralized/Federated options like ActivityPub may help in your journey in what surely is a great idea. Check Lemmy, for example, on a real stackoverflow option - https://join-lemmy.org/ and Gitea already working on a federated "Github".

They operate mostly in the computer science academic community, last time I checked.

For example, there are several attempts to overlay review on pre-prints and open repositories (like Zenodo), but they aren't identifying qualified reviewers and matching them to papers in any way. There are the repositories and pre-prints themselves, but they aren't providing review. There are attempts to build open journals, but they're still taking the journal form, which means they still have lots of manual overhead.

Most of them have varying amounts of traction, but few seem to actually be on a course to replace the whole system.

...it remains to be seen whether peer-review.io will fare any better. I think it has a chance because it does provide an alternative system for each of the services the journals provide. Well -- except one, which is the moderator role the editor sometimes plays. That may prove fatal, but only time will tell.

Like if a major paper is withdrawn, or a theory disproven, could you get a list of significantly impacted papers?

(Although, the first contribution would probably need to be getting the local working again in a new context... I've been going fast and taking on some techdebt that will need to be paid down soon.)