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Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing (octosphere.social)

8h ago by crimsoneer 48 points 14 comments

Murskautuminen 27m ago

I am afraid that gatekeeping is partially essential and somewhat desired, as an academic you don't have time to read everything and some sort of quick signals, albeit very flawed, can be useful to stop wasting time reading crappy science. If you don't gatekeep you will get a lot of crappy papers or papers that mention the same thing and it will waste more time from people that wish to get a quick sense of the state of a topic/field from quality work. An open source voting system would be easily abused, so it will end up to be trusting a select service of peer reviewers or agencies. Especially if a paper includes a lot of experiments and figures that can be somewhat complicated or overwhelming. What do think?

verdverm 8h ago

Are you aware of the current efforts by researchers on Bluesky to build a new researchers platform on ATProto? (Forget the project name at the moment)

If not, same handle over there, I can get you in touch with them. Or hit up Boris, he knows everyone and is happy to make connections

There's also a full day at the upcoming conference on ATProto & scientific related things. I think they com on discourse more (?)

crimsoneer 8h ago

Ooh no, please do, but would love to hear more!

verdverm 8h ago

Go chime in and share your work here: https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/about-the-atproto-s...

That'll get us connected off HN

I think Cosmik is the group I was thinking of that has also put out some initial poc like yourself

Johnny_Bonk 8h ago

id also be curious to follow this if you have any links or resources

verdverm 8h ago

This is probably a good jumping off point

https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/about-the-atproto-s...

rsolva 3h ago

@criomsoneer: Check out Open Science Network (Bonfire), they are also doing interesting work in this space! https://openscience.network/

gnarlouse 7h ago

Integrate them peer review process and you’ve got a disrupter

mlpoknbji 6h ago

Peer review should be disrupted, but doing peer review via social media is not the way to go.

perching_aix 5h ago

Has a bit of a leg up in that if it's only academics commenting, it would probably be way more usable than typical social media, maybe even outright good.

crimsoneer 7h ago

Right? This is kind of the dream.

naasking 6h ago

Calling it peer review suggests gatekeeping. I suggest no gatekeepind just let any academic post a review, and maybe upvote/downvote and let crowdsourcing handle the rest.

staplers 6h ago

While I appreciate no gatekeeping, the other side of the coin is gatekeeping via bots (vote manipulation).

Something like rotten tomatoes could be useful. Have a list of "verified" users (critic score) in a separate voting column as anon users (audience score).

This will often serve useful in highly controversial situations to parse common narratives.

11101010010001 4h ago

Yes publishing is broken, but academics are the last people to jump onto platforms...they never left email. If you want to change the publishing game, turn publishing into email.