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Faculty Votes For Open Access Policy At UC San Francisco
Marian the Librarian writes "UCSF is among the first public institutions to adopt an open access policy, and is the largest scientific institution to have such a policy. The policy, voted unanimously by the faculty, will allow UCSF authors to put electronic versions of their published scientific articles on an open access repository making their research findings freely available to the public. Dr. Richard A. Schneider, who led the initiative, said, 'Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals. The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers to scientific research.'"
Yes, but without journals, how will we per-judge the quality of others' work? This may sound facetious, but it's not. Any fool can write a journal article, and many fools can write compelling article. A journal offers getting and review by members in the field. How else can I judge the validity of a paper, especially if I'm not in the field myself?
Well, I think the solution lies in cryptography (disclaimer: I am a grad student doing research in cryptography). You need a system where researchers in a field could apply digital signatures to papers, but with a twist: the reviewers should remain anonymous after applying those signatures. This is not an impossible task; it is called a "group signature." The idea is that universities/researchers would cooperate to bring peer reviewers together, and those reviewers would be given group signature keys that they would apply to the papers they review. A person reading a paper could verify the signatures, which would tell them which consortium of universities/researchers organized the review process for that paper.
Like journals, the groups of reviewers could be organized on a per-month basis, and the names the whole group would be published -- with only a fraction actually reviewing any particular paper. It is not a complete break from journals as a system, it is just a way to use computers and the Internet to publish instead of relying on the old publishing companies; the way researchers communicate with each other has changed, and publishing articles should change too.
Palm trees and 8