Decentralizing Journals and Peer Review DAOs: the evolution of legitimacy in scientific publishing

Reviewers have day jobs and other things they are doing as well. Review fatigue is becoming more real as more papers get constantly submitted at a higher ratio than new reviewers enter.

The key reason I think a DAO here could be useful is because so much labor is already working for free in the existing journal system while the journal charges an insane take rate + the reviewers aren’t getting much credit. A system like this might unlock some of that take rate to be redeployed into funding more research, would create a system wher... See more

Peer-review as a process takes a long time. PNAS is a highly selective publication and says from submission to publication can take on average 6.4 months. It takes 6 of those months just to stop laughing at the name of the publication (sorry, I'm a child).

The system of peer-review and publishing has worked for a long time when we were actually dependent on them for things like physical distribution of magazines, manuscripts, etc. Today, journals use the industry's reliance on peer-reviewed publications as a proxy for quality in order to coordinate a lot of unpaid labor. Authors are somewhat dependen... See more

DAOs have systems of organizing tasks that need to get done along with incentives for said tasks. This can be monetary incentives like bounties or reputational incentives to get other benefits in the DAO like more voting power.

There’s some means of discussion where members can chat about things the DAO wants to do. A lot of this happens in Discord, Twitter, etc. today.

Second has been the rise of open-access journals. These are journals that allow readers to access the published articles for free and instead derive most of their revenue from charging the authors Article Processing Charges. Some of the name brand journals also have a hybrid model where authors can pay to make their research open-access. And the pr... See more

. The CEO of a journal is deciding the direction of the company, the rules are disseminated through the ranks of the company, and the authors/peer reviewers don’t have a ton of say or ownership in the direction of the journal. DAOs raise the question of whether you can do this without any singular entity making these decisions, and instead, the dec... See more

There’s some means of voting and governance on issues and participants have some form of weighted voting. The weight can be on the reputation of the person voting, how much ownership they have of the network via tokens, and more.

There seems to be an open debate on whether the current system of peer-review actually weeds out papers correctly. This experiment re-submitted 12 already approved papers and 89% of the peer reviewers said the paper shouldn’t be published. More recently hundreds of sham papers managed to get through the process as scammers posed as guest editors.