On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 11:42:40PM -0800, Russell Senior wrote: > My wife is an academic reference librarian, which gives me unearned > license to rant with (ungranted) proxy-authority on this.
Perhaps your wife is up for a PLUG talk? An open discussion between reference librarians and coders might lead to peer-to-peer tools for disseminating academic papers, tagging them with comments and updates as the papers spread themselves "hublessly" around the web. > ... libraries have increasingly transitioned from functioning as > communal longterm archives of knowledge (which *ought* no longer > be needed ... PLOS and arxiv.org and Wikipedia are great, but in the broadband age, with multiple copies stored on multiple nodes, and public/private keys and digital signing, who needs centralized servers anyway? We can use key signing and web-of-trust for reviews. Papers with flaws can be fixed over time, or annotated by others. Good for new papers, maybe, but what about the archival stuff, whose authors are dead but whose works are p0wned by Wiley and Elsevier? Possible answer: *Developing world educational paraphrasing*. I've seen estimates that peer-reviewed paper production increases 2.5% a year, and that about 1.6 million papers were produced last year. Assuming a geometric decrease backwards in time, that is 64 million papers (Wikipedia is 4.6 million articles and stubs). Assume a $35 per paper access fee, that is 2.24 billion dollars to access all of them one time. The papers are reordered and rewritten and paraphrased in new English, damaging the language of some papers, perhaps improving others, hopefully improving translatability. This is done by students at academic institutions worldwide, perhaps as work study funded by relatively rich westerners. The students learn, they get some money for school, their professors supervise. Images would be "interesting". Perhaps graphs and drawings and diagrams can be reinterpreted transformed into numbers and gnuplot commands, or SVG. Most photographs can be retaken - the tools have gotten better and cheaper. All the old papers would be "stubs" - the beginning of a rich tapestry of future expansions and forks. Oh, the arguments we will have, the "originals" versus the "correctors" versus the "improvers". If this works the way I hope, the academic paywall shops will go bankrupt, the community can buy their content for pennies on the dollar, then plug it into the rich web of evolving versions. > </rant> Russell - love the rant. Now, what can we do to transform and democratize 21st century academic publishing, using the inventiveness of the open source movement and a planetful of powerful web-connected computers? How can we transform the world's population into 7 billion questing students - who can collaborate and translate and annotate 64 million academic papers in days, then "protect" their knowledge forever, by spreading thousands of copies throughout the web? Education as bittorrent? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
