Incentivized Overlay Journal: Revolutionizing Scientific Reviews with Novel Technologies
Resistance to change is not unique to humans. Legacy systems, especially within established industries, are often rigid in the face of new paradigms. Science publishing is no exception. The present peer-review system consists of journals keeping author manuscripts ‘hostage’ until publication, forcing authors to navigate rounds of reviews across different journals, sometimes within the same family, to finally get their acceptance in their paper’s final home. Once published, the work exists as a static combination of text and images, devoid of any hope for update beyond minor errata meant for rectifying mistakes rather than updating knowledge per se.
This system made sense during the era of the printing press, where throughput was limited and communication among scientists required a clear, established reference point.
Naturally, a dynamically evolving pool of knowledge would have induced chaos, majorly impeding communication. Today, the internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, prompting us to reconsider the pertinence of a system optimized for a vastly different and outdated world. For instance, one way we can modernize scientific communication in the era of the internet is to timestamp updates to scientific papers, making numerous versions readily accessible to the whole world.
Rising from the idea of increased efficiency in communicating scientific results, a recent concept in academic publishing has emerged: overlay journals. Their basic premise is the decoupling of science archiving, dissemination and evaluation. Preprint servers like arXiv have been rising in popularity, driven by the desire to publish results without unnecessary delays. Overlay journals can then pick preprints from archiving and hosting services and subject them to standard peer-review, adding the coveted layer of expert validation to research findings.
The present academic review system is notorious for its high profit margins for big publishers, relying on reader payments or author-paid Article Processing Charges (APCs) as a requirement for open-access publishing. Remarkably, these charges rarely extend to compensating reviewers — although editors do receive payments as they are explicitly employed by the journals. With a bit of creativity, one could envision a system where reviewers are incentivized to engage in the peer-review process with minimal need for the usual coordination typically handled by journal editors, thus cutting-out the middle-man to a substantial degree.
This theoretical system naturally requires a social and financial component. Reviewers would demonstrate competence, often through established reputation from prior work, hence the social component. Likewise, monetary incentives paid to reviewers will constitute the financial component. And what better modern innovation than blockchain technology to enable these 2 aspects to work seamlessly together? A simple onchain validator can help ensure that incentives are properly distributed to concerned parties, allowing authors to create small simple tasks aimed at attracting reviewers to perform tasks they would normally undertake for the benefit of a regular scientific journal.
Ultimately, what better way there is than having a voluntary, open system for incentivizing experts to validate open access scientific content?
