alt Hacker NewsOne growing role, especially in mathematics, is that of a host for "overlay journals": https://www.insmi.cnrs.fr/en/cnrsinfo/epijournaux-en-mathema...
I really like the idea. In short: arXiv, HAL and similar sites host the papers without any peer review (short of perhaps stopping crank spam) or access control. They're freely available to anyone. Authors then submit arXiv IDs (or similar) to the reviewers of "overlay journals", which then review and accept or not. The overlay journal accepts a paper by just adding it to its list of accepted arXiv identifiers, and that's that.
This ensures accessibility for all, keeps peer review, yet takes a lot of the practical hurdles away from actually running a journal. A journal can now just be a group of people who give thumbs up or down to arXiv identifiers, and if that group's conclusion start having weight in the community then it's become an important journal. Maybe they give away their listings for free, maybe they charge to read the reviews – it's really up to them what the business model (if any) will be.
It's really nice.
Replies
I think the DOI system provides a stable identifier for a paper that is not specific to arXiv?
I’ve been arguing for this for a long time, glad to see this sort of thing start.
Papers “being in” a journal hasn’t made sense for a long time, but curation is valuable as is staking reputation on something.
People I was with called some of this “badges”, there is no reason why a paper cannot be reviewed by a set of people who say “this is new and innovative stuff in the field and highly important if true, but we’re not making claims about the stats” and a different set able to say “the stats here is spot on but we don’t know how relevant it is in biology” and another to say “we can rerun the code and get the same analysis results out, but we don’t know if the analysis is doing anything useful”. Right now we have journals making some combination of claims, and authors have to pick a single journal.
Once you view journals as a list of papers, the exclusivity seems weird. Once you see that journals are then a set of identifiers added to a paper, or rather statements about a paper, there’s lots of interesting ways you can imagine more useful things than current publishing.