This is a very interesting concept and one I think most comments here are missing. This isn't a question as to why Mastodon (or "Fediverse") has yet to catch on in the wider public. It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.
I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific problem. There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals.
That is, Mastodon does solve a kind of problem that is related to closed groups of individuals collaborating on a moderated topic. And it allows those closed groups to broadcast their work into a network and to selectively include elements from outside networks. You could probably use those raw tools to create something that might sort of work for scholarly societies.
But it does feel a bit like trying to shape the problem to fit the solution (put another way, if you have a nice new shiny hammer, suddenly a lot of problems start to look like nails). I think the article is trying to suggest that federation is a tool that is flexible enough to fill that role, but I believe a significant amount of infrastructure would need to be built on top of federation to achieve such a role. And also, a significant culture and process change would have to take place within academia.
Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.
Don't conflate peer review with paid journals, they're very different things. The money received by paid journals doesn't go to the reviewers. The reviewers are mostly professors who have their own funding. I reviewed a paper recently; I certainly didn't get paid for it!
Some disciplines are switching to open access journals, meaning that anyone can read the articles for free, and there's no big publisher sucking up tons of money. But there's still peer review.
In my experience open access still includes a big publisher sucking up tons of money. It is just money paid up front by authors. Do you have an example of open access were that is not the case?
Some disciplines have started moving to Arxiv. And all the major programming languages conferences (PLDI, POPL, ICFP, more) switched to PACMPL, which is open acess and I expect is cheaper but am not sure how to check. I don't know much about this; mostly just wanted to make the point that peer review != publishing.
That is fair, I have no reason to paint all academic publishing with a single broad brush. Personally, I am strongly on the side of free and open - probably in the direction of things like the Open Data Institute (ODI).
But data, including academic papers published by scientific societies, being free and open has nothing whatsoever to do with the communication protocols underlying those societies. You can have free, open and peer reviewed journals distributed by email, by FTP, by carrier pigeon, etc.
So if your beef with academic societies is merely the cost or the closed nature, federated protocols needn't be part of the discussion at all.
You are on point: paid journals bring nothing to the table, except that they have somehow established reputations (of varying levels), where people publish their papers. But the journals themselves do very little. It's largely or entirely volunteers who review papers and select the ones that get publish.
The journals are completely replaceable. You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destination. The volunteers would do exactly the same work. Obviously, the website requires some funding, but a tiny fraction of what the journals take.
> You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destination.
Just as a quick counter - you'd want to base this on something more permanent. CLOCKSS[0] or something similar is a necessity with DOIs pointing to the papers. Otherwise you're back to "the source code is here: (broken link to old academic site)"
I agree that the use of journals for the literal job of publishing seems antiquated.
(disclaimer, worked previously for the parent company of FigShare, other providers are available)
Last time I read such an HN comment thread, one poster claimed that Sci-Hub was morally wrong because “how will peer reviewers get paid if people just pirate the papers?”. Tell me you don’t know anything about academic publishing without telling me you don’t know anything about academic publishing. Seems to be a widespread misconception.
> There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals.
> Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.
To be clear, federation and even the ActivityPub protocol have nothing to do with the tweet-like interface of Mastodon (and ActivityPub isn't the only way to federate, either. Email is federated), although TBF the article itself fails to make this distinction clear. There are a number of ActivityPub applications which use a different presentation:
* Wordpress: Ubiquitous (maximalist?) long-form blogging platform that has recently added ActivityPub support
That said, I'll admit I have no idea what the obstacles are since I never got into that world. Are there technical requirements which nothing else fulfills? Does it mainly require providing a means of searching for research documents in different stages of review and validating that an individual is a legitimate reviewer/contributor (something like the authorization around git, come to think of it)?
To be more precise, ActivityPub is pretty much just a JSON/HTTP version of email.
There's a few fancy things to have stuff like user profiles and stuff to make it "look nice", but if you look "under the hood", the data structures you find ends up and the methods of communication end up looking more or less like a modernized version of email.
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Mastodon is a sub-implementation of AP that follows some of the components and then weirdly tweaks some of them in weird ways (because Mastodons internal representation doesn't actually match up with these data structures and Gargron wanted some features like Content Warnings without bothering with the entire process of protocol modifications, so he ended up cannibalizing a different field for it, resulting in an implementation that... mostly results in people yelling at each other for not using CWs "appropriately"), resulting in strange compatibility issues when writing your own AP instance.
Most AP instances typically end up trying to then match Mastodons weird implementation (basically look at the social feed of any AP implementer for long enough and you'll find complaints about how Mastodon doesn't follow the spec), simply because of Mastodons excessive popularity.
I'm not an expert on ActivityPub nor academic publishing. What I'm trying to say is that what is built on top of the protocol has more to do with its suitability for a particular purpose than the foundational technology.
The first quote is an observation that It is unlikely that Mastodon will be a suitable drop-in-replacement for the current process.
The second quote is an observation that perhaps there is a way to use the technological pieces that are currently available for federation and apply them to the organization of scientific/academic societies. But that whole system is going to be significantly more than the federated aspect.
Part of this is I remember Google Wave and the unreasonable hype around it. It would replace email, newsgroups, instant messaging … basically all forms of text based communication! Some of the hype for these more contemporary niche technologies is even wilder, this article for example claiming it should force a complete re-think of academic publishing.
> It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.
That is a decision by granting agencies and administrators who distribute funding. The scholars will organize around whatever the people who pay them tell them to.
This is the only response that actually addresses the article and my criticism. You make a good point that pressuring the governmental agencies that distribute funding to adopt a set of requirements could push the entire academic body in a particular direction.
I still don't see the point in choosing federated protocols as a mandate if we were to do this. My preference would be to use that energy towards free and open data sources. I think arXiv is the best example for that and not Mastodon.
> scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.
They aren’t necessarily. In some branches of linguistics, history, and archaeology, for example, the major journals are still published by learned societies or national academies of science, and they are open-access and authors don’t pay to publish. The costs are covered by the massive endowments that the learned societies sit on (some were founded in the 19th century).
> It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.
There are some perverse incentives in place that hinder migrating away from official journals. The publish or perish pressure leads only high-quality work to count, and the method used to objectively determine if a paper meets the bar is whether it was accepted in established journals. New journals do not have the reputation in place, thus they don't feature in lists of acceptable publications for the purpose of gathering publication metrics. In some places some of these rules applied to state institutions are even set by laws, which are hard to change.
On top of that, some journals are even controlled by leading researchers, which helps building up influence in the field.
To put it plainly, why would any researcher go the extra mile to switch publications?
I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific problem. There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals.
That is, Mastodon does solve a kind of problem that is related to closed groups of individuals collaborating on a moderated topic. And it allows those closed groups to broadcast their work into a network and to selectively include elements from outside networks. You could probably use those raw tools to create something that might sort of work for scholarly societies.
But it does feel a bit like trying to shape the problem to fit the solution (put another way, if you have a nice new shiny hammer, suddenly a lot of problems start to look like nails). I think the article is trying to suggest that federation is a tool that is flexible enough to fill that role, but I believe a significant amount of infrastructure would need to be built on top of federation to achieve such a role. And also, a significant culture and process change would have to take place within academia.
Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.