A web community of academics with the aim of killing the current journal publishing model - ideas.okfn.org

[From the Ideas Incubator at OKFN] “Several publishers and academic institutions have tried to make community-based tools that crowd-source academics (or hand-pick them, which is worse...) to recommend good journal articles or encourage discussion of articles as they're published. By and large they've failed, but the tools are out there and it may very well not be long before the ultimate journal-killing web resource comes along which allows publication of results and the discussion and distillation of them into something much easier to digest than your average paper. The main thing that's missing is a system which actually encourages discussion so that there is a lively debate going on around each publication or result. I don't think anyone's been able to make this happen yet. I have some ideas for how to do this which I think are blindingly obviously the way to do it, but so far no one in the publishing world seems to have thought of them, so maybe they're wildly impractical. It would be great if the OKF could get hold of some government funding and have a go at making this thing though, as I think you're a) the right organisation to be trusted to do it right; and b) in a very good position to be in with a chance of making it work - you've got the skills and I expect you've also got the contacts, or if you don't have the contacts I expect it'd be easy to get them.”