Paper publishing system

Hi everyone,

Following with the course of Dr. Joaquin Sevilla, my next assignemnt is to give my opinion and some comments regarding the system of publishing scientific papers. After getting familiarized about how the impact factor and peer review system works in articles that are published in specific journals, it is clear that the system it is not perfect. Futhermore, it could be argued that it is deprecated since nowadays we have much faster communication means than journals. However, what makes this sytem difficult to change is the solid base in terms of research quality that has established among the scientific community.

As discussed in the latest post of Dr. Joaquin Sevilla, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has risen even more arguments against the peer review system, since a lot of new discoveries and experiments take long time until they are published and the situation requires a fast response due to the people dying from it. As an alternative, scientists are tending more towards preprint platforms like ArXiv, medRxiv, bioRxiv, Queios y OSFpreprints to show the results of their research. These are sites where authors publish their papers for making the knowledge available for the community before been reviewed by the journals.

After researching about this controversial discussion, I have been thinking about how I would improve the current publishing system. I think that a blockchain (yes, the same technology used for bitcoin and ethereum transactions) based review process could give urgency and dynamism that are demanded in the process withouth facing the risk of loosing preciseness and objectiveness. The main problem about the system would lay in the participants of the blockchain network that would allow to either accept or reject an article. Who would those participants be? Would they need to have a minimum knowledge in the topic in question? How could we control that? These are open questions that would inmediately arise when implementing this system.

CONCLUSIONS

Blockchain is a technology that could greatly accelerate the reviewing process. Nevertheless, it presents some open questions needed to adress, since validating a paper is not as easy as proving the rightness of a transaction via bitcoin, which is automatically done by software (more information can be found in this video. Nevertheless, it is an alternative that we should consider for the near future if we want to make the validation process of papers faster.

As always, in case you have any doubt, I would be pleased to help you.