Could a papester button irreversibly break down the research paywall? « Neuroconscience

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-15

Summary:

"A friend just sent me the link to the Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR liberator. We started talking about it and it led to a pretty interesting idea.  As soon as I saw this it clicked: we need papester. We need a simple browser plugin that can recognize, download and re-upload any research document automatically (think zotero) to BitTorrent (this was Aaron’s original idea, just crowdsourced). These would then be automatically turned into torrents with an associated magnet link. The plugin would interact with a lightweight torrent client, using a set limit of your bandwidth (say 5%) to constantly seed back any files you have in your (zotero) library folder. Also, it would automatically use part of the bandwidth to seed missing papers (first working through a queue of DOIs of papers that were searched for by others and then just for any missing paper in reverse chronological order), so that over time all papers would be on BitTorrent. The links would be archived by google; any search engine could then find them and the plug-in would show the PDF download link.  Once this system is in place, a pirate-bay/reddit mash-up could help sort the magnet links as a meta-data rich papester torrent tracker. Users could posts comments and reviews, which would themselves be subject to karma. Over time a sorting algorithm could give greater weight to reviews from authors who consistently review unretracted papers, creating a kind of front page where 'hot' would give you the latest research and 'lasting' would give you timeless classics. Separating the sorting mechanism – which can essentially be any tracker – and the rating/meta-data system ensures that neither can be easily brought down. If users wish they could compile independent trackers for particular topics or highly rated papers, form review committees, and request new experiments to address flagged issues in existing articles. In this way we would ensure not only an everlasting and loss-protected research database, but irreversibly push academic publishing into an open-access and democratic review system. Students and people without access to scientific knowledge could easily find forgotten classics and the latest buzz with a simple sort. We need an 'research-reddit' rating layer  - why not solve Open Access and peer review in one go?"

Link:

http://neuroconscience.com/2013/01/15/could-a-papester-button-irreversibly-break-down-the-research-paywall/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.peer_review oa.crowd oa.metadata oa.ratings oa.zotero oa.dois oa.reddit oa.pirate_bay oa.guerrilla oa.papester

Date tagged:

01/15/2013, 15:40

Date published:

01/15/2013, 10:40