Web of Trust For Scientific Publications

An anonymous reader writes "PGP and GnuPG have been utilizing webs of trust to establish authenticity without a centralized certificate authority for a while. Now, a new tool seeks to extend the concept to include scientific publications. The idea is that researchers can review and sign each others' works with varying levels of endorsement, and display the signed reviews with their vitas. This creates a decentralized social network linking researchers, papers, and reviews that, in theory, represents the scientific community. It meshes seamlessly with traditional publication venues. One can publish a paper with an established journal, and still try to get more out of the paper by asking colleagues to review the work. The hope is that this will eventually provide an alternative method for researchers to establish credibility."

Comments

Very poor idea

[littleghoti]

What is important is *anonymous* peer review. There needs to be a mechanism for new scientists to question established researchers without lasting detriment to their careers. On another note, what I thought this article might be about was CiteULike, which is great. Any academics should check it out

Re:Very poor idea

[TheSunborn]

I might have missed something, but I am pretty sure that most Peer review are anonymous. (The authors of the paper don't know who the reviewer are). The publisher does know, but he keeps it secret.

arXiv leads the way

[MoxFulder]

arXiv, the pioneering online preprint archive, already does something like this, though not as sophisticated. They have an endorsement system, wherein more established users endorse newer ones. It's fairly rudimentary and ad-hoc, but seems to keep out crackpots and spam fairly well in practice.