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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."
This is exactly what Wikipedia needs to implement.
This will allow it to overcome the credibility problems that it has.
The hash isn't necessary. If the trust relationship between two academic peers includes "worried about him modify the paper after I review it", there is no trust relationship.
In fact, the whole thing isn't necessary. Pubmed, anyone? All someone has to do is pick up the phone and call the reference on a CV and say, "So, what did you think of Dr. X's work on Y?", and they learn more than they will running a program that says "Hashes verified."
This system is also never going to fly with researchers. Most (but not all) of the (brilliant) bio people I've worked with are completely helpless when it comes to technical stuff. Even some of the bioinformatics people who can write amazing algorithms aren't clued in on stuff outside of their field.
Please help metamoderate.
They are anonymous--the same way student reviews of a professor in a class with 5 students are anonymous. By the time you're doing anything original, innovative, and remotely interesting in a field, you're going to have 20 peers tops--very likely only 5 or so. Some of your reviewers will be unrelated and able to check basic mathematics for correctness but not much more.
Honestly, I think I haven't yet seen someone receive comments back where they couldn't take a good guess at who the originator was...