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

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

Journals today act as coordination + reputation, but they charge an insane amount to do so. Maybe DAOs can do it better, especially since the main things that people involved in peer-review want more of is recognition, grants, transparency, and interoperable peer review contributions.

There are rules in place for how things are executed and smart contracts which make them actually happen. There are basically no intermediaries to setting up and executing these (which can also make decisions permanent, posing other issues).

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 is some form of reputation scoring. Reddit for example has Reddit gold, and badges, etc. which travels with a person’s avatar. In the DAO version of this, those rewards can travel with a person who goes to any other DAO built on top of the same protocol (aka. Interoperability, a word you all know!)

Membership to the DAO can be gated or not. You might need to purchase tokens to participate, be admitted by existing members, etc. Or it could be totally open.

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.

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.

. 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