Posted by
Roger Critchlow-2 on
Jan 30, 2009; 3:44pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Homeostasis-by-Peer-Review-tp2228018p2245479.html
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:40 PM, John Kennison <
[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> Maybe in the near future, researchers will publish papers on their web sites and journals would consist of stars (and maybe other symbols) and links.
> ________________________________________
In a sense that's what already happens, except that they publish on
arXiv.org, and the stars are being kept for some topics on blogs here
and there, but mostly in people's heads.
Recommender systems try to track the stars for books (Amazon) and
movies (Netflix) and websites (Google),
http://recsys.acm.org/ and
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/recommender_systems.php, but they
all fail when the thing to be recommended falls outside the space
spanned by previous experience. And they all assume a dilettante's
interest in the recommendations and that everyone has a useful opinion
about everything, neither of which holds when we get into the lands of
publish-or-perish.
Ideally you would have a wiki on top of arXiv.org where each wiki
article was an ongoing review of the literature in the article's
subject. And when one published on arXiv.org one would not just pick a
single topic of publication but submit to all the reviews which might
find the new article relevant. And the reviews would need to be
multi-threaded, a hyper-wiki, so that differences of opinion could
exist side by side rather than attempting to obliterate each other
through ping pong edits.
And that's the issue, of course, in journals or on wikipedia: whether
the metastasized consensus can silence minority opinion by declining
to publish or by blacklisting ip addresses or otherwise excluding them
from the one true venue. Free speech meets true speech.
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