
Show HN: Endorsements for Open Access Research - Vinnl
https://plaudit.pub/extension
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Vinnl
Hi HN,

I feel I should add some additional Bigger Picture context here. You might
have seen me show up here on Hacker News whenever Open Access gets discussed.
I feel strongly about free access to publicly funded research, and Plaudit is
where I'm contributing to making a transition to Open Access happen.

The key problem we're trying to solve is that researchers feel pressured to
publish in "reputable", but often paywalled, journals. After all, it's still
the case that being able to say you've been published in Nature is often a
huge career boost.

The way we're trying to solve that is by removing the journal indirection.
Rather than the journal's name being a stamp of approval signifying that
trusted researchers have looked at and approved of a work, those researchers
can indicate that approval directly - without delaying or preventing the
work's publication.

It should be noted that this extension is not the primary method with which we
hope to collect these endorsements. Rather, the goal is to have an endorsement
widget integrated directly by publishers of academic research. This pilot is
currently supported by eLife Innovation [1] and the Center for Open Science
[2], and I'm working with a few preprint servers to help them integrate it.

That said, I wanted to allow individuals to contribute as well. This extension
will inject the widget into the websites of a few explicitly supported
academic publishers. Additionally, it will add a toolbar icon to most websites
that host scholarly research, allowing you to endorse that research as well.
Endorsements added through the extension will be useful to other users of the
extension, but more importantly they will add incentive for publishers to
incorporate the widget into their website, thus exposing those endorsements.

Good to know: all this is not for profit, open source, and endorsement data is
made available openly as well.

I will be hanging around to answer any questions and read all remarks and
suggestions you might have, so fire away.

[1] [https://elifesciences.org/labs](https://elifesciences.org/labs)

[2] [https://cos.io/](https://cos.io/)

