Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Web of Trust For Scientific Publications

Posted by timothy on from the chickenscratch-my-back-I'll-chickenscratch-yours dept.

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."

14 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Wikipedia by jgtg32a · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is exactly what Wikipedia needs to implement.

    This will allow it to overcome the credibility problems that it has.

    1. Re:Wikipedia by MoxFulder · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Indeed, the implementation of flagged revisions is currently being debated for the English Wikipedia, and was the subject of a recent ./ article.

      A lot of the debate centers on exactly what the "signing" process will entail in terms of responsibilities and consequences for the articles subject to it.

      I don't think a one-size-fits-all approach to trust networks is a good idea. Requirements for effective trust in key sharing, peer review, and wiki content may differ and I think it's appropriate for each to develop a fine-tuned approach, while borrowing good ideas from one another.

      --
      My bicyles
  2. Still needs a root by orclevegam · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem of course is that at some level you still need to have a known good reference for the whole "web" to work. It doesn't help your credibility at all if you've got a paper signed by 100 of your closest crackpot buddies. What this does provide is the ability for someone in addition to established authorities to vet a work, such that a well respected member of the scientific community can easily and in a verifiable fashion signify his approval of a paper.

    --
    Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
    1. Re:Still needs a root by DancesWithBlowTorch · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, it doesn't need a root. Quite on the contrary, the developing graph could give amazing insight into the structure of research communities. It would be possible to identify researchers forming links between otherwise almost disconnected areas of research, and to find the great minds at the centre of such blocks. There is no "root" to the web of scientists. Even people like Erdös were only ever local subroots.

      I think this project is a great idea. Unfortunately, it currently seems to consist of only a command line tool to sign reviews with GPG. That's nowhere near enough if it is to thrive beyond the CS world. It needs a simple, rock-solid GUI, and most importantly, lots of eye-candy for the graph. It will need to look cool and work well to build up the momentum for this to work at all.

    2. Re:Still needs a root by PDAllen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Journal publications are basically used to tell people who don't work in your area that you're doing decent work. If someone is doing decent work in an area you're a specialist in, you probably know them at least by sight and you probably hear about their results fairly soon after they prove them; the journal paper may well come a year or two later.

      But if you want funding, or you want a job, you have to convince a bunch of people who know very little about your area that you are a valuable person. The easiest way to do that is to point at recent papers in good journals (which, really, isn't so different to the web of trust idea: I have a paper in CPC because someone thought my work was good enough to go there, that kind of thing).

      There are lots of problems with the sort of metric you suggest; you need something relevant to now, you don't want it to discard people who do good work on their own or in tight groups (and there are quite a few of the latter), you don't want it to be distorted by the sort of mathematician who will publish every result they can get in any collaboration (there are quite a few, some of whom are very good and very well-connected but still publish some boring results along with the good ones).

  3. Weird objection by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm sometimes bothered by the stress on studies being "verified" by something like a peer-review process. Not that I don't understand why it makes sense. It's a pretty reasonable attempt to sort valid work from crap, but...

    There's still a certain way in which it's just an appeal to authority. It's people saying, "We should accept what this scientist says because other scientists say that he's right." I guess what I'm saying is that I worry that, as a process like this becomes more technical, people will be more likely to confuse a statement like, "This study has been reviewed by other scientists and seems to have merit," with something more like, "This study is correct, infallible, and indisputable."

    And I guess part of the reason I worry about this is that there may be cases where what "everyone thinks" (i.e. the common conception even among experts) is wrong, and some random nutcase is right. It almost never happens, but it happens sometimes. It seems to me that a technical method of assigning trustworthiness of ideas in a web of trust might possibly lead to having all the groundbreaking ideas go into a spam filter somewhere, never to be seen again.

    1. Re:Weird objection by orclevegam · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Interesting point. Something that occurs to me however is that any paper worth its salt really has two things that can be verified/approved independently of each other. The first, and easier of the two is the test procedures, and any math/established formula used. Assuming that no flaw can be found with that, you move on the second part, which is the theory being proposed to explain the results of the tests and/or how any discrepancies between the observed results and the theory are handled. It's entirely possible to have a paper that has excellent test results that raise interesting questions, but a completely nutjob theory attached to it. To ignore the results of the tests because the theory is crazy is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Likewise, just because the theory proposed in a paper is a well established and respected theory is no reason to sign off on flawed test results.

      --
      Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
    2. Re:Weird objection by evanbd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As a third party, there is no way I have the time to follow the chain of logic that results in a modern scientific paper from first principles. At some point, I have to accept some of the preconditions of the paper without verifying them, because doing otherwise implies that I am an expert in the particular field the paper is relevant to. And there are plenty of cases where I want to make use of a result from a field that is related to my work but in which I am not an expert.

      Appeal to authority is the fundamental reasoning technique I apply in such cases. A respected expert says it is so, and so I will trust them until I have reason to believe otherwise. That trust should not be blind -- if I am presented with reason to, I will happily re-evaluate that trust. Perhaps the expert is mistaken. But, in the interest of actually getting something done myself, I will accept as a default position that the experts know what they're talking about.

    3. Re:Weird objection by ralphbecket · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Peer review is actually pretty weak. It's mainly effective at spotting obvious howling errors. Peer review is not the same as replication and, indeed, many reviewers don't bother to check the equations or data presented in a paper unless they are genuinely suspicious of the conclusion. Replication, not peer review, is the gold standard of science.

  4. a cumbersome solution in search of a problem by SuperBanana · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  5. Very poor idea by littleghoti · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Very poor idea by rlseaman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There have been numerous attempts to redefine peer review to bring it into the 21st century. There will be many more after this effort.

      Peer review is typically anonymous. It represents a trust relationship between the editor and the referee, not directly between the author and the reviewer. If the journal - or rather, the editor - is removed from the equation, then some new mechanism is needed. It isn't obvious that the web of trust as described fits the bill, however.

      An equivalent to a distributed certificate authority already exists and is widely used as a metric. The only certification that will be believed - even from professional peers - is to demonstrate a need and desire to actually use the results of prior publications. These are denoted (and trusted) by building a chain of publications by tracing back through the references embedded in subsequent publications themselves.

    2. Re:Very poor idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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...

  6. Already got one by burris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Scientific publications already have a web of trust in the list of cites at the bottom. Publications don't get cited unless they are notable in some way.