So the world's most prestigious universities who have a problem with the status quo band together and lend their own credibility to a new platform that they run together. Cut out the middle-man.
It's not just that the platform needs to be considered credible; it's that they're used as a proxy for the relative quality of academic research. So an article in Nature is considered "better" than an article in Humbug's Best Journal.
Generally, I think the better idea would be to unlink evaluation from publication - so researchers can publish their articles wherever, and separate from that, reputable colleagues endorse their works (or not). In the end, journals derive their credibility from the reputations of their peer reviewers and editors, so that is a way to cut out the middle man.
The challenge, of course, is getting researchers to actually do that.
(Disclaimer: I'm part of a project that does exactly that.)
I really like the idea of unlinking publication from evaluation. Especially in CS people cite arxiv preprints all the time since the field moves so fast. I do this in my own work as well, but most of my field does not publish preprints on arxiv. Without real infrastructure, we’re all de facto relying on google scholar to sort all these things out.
I’m starting to think that open and signed reviews would go a long way towards moving from review as a gatekeeping mechanism to a means of improving the overall quality and accessibility of the scientific discourse.
It's called Plaudit.pub [1] and launched not too long ago. The aim is for preprint servers (and eventually journals) to display endorsements right next to the research they host, but more most of them, this currently requires a browser extension.
Also note that it currently only provides a solution for the endorsement part of evaluation - you'd still have to use, say, email or a comment form to provide actual feedback.
I think that would be great, but without getting several famous researchers to serve as editors for each new journal at the subfield level, it’s not going to address the real problem. Citations and impact (real and perceived) are the currency of academia — people publish in Science, Nature, and high-impact-factor Elsevier journals because those are the journals that “everybody reads,” and a new open access venue is going to be written off by many academics (read PhD advisors) as “nobody has heard of it, no one will see it, no one will cite it.” I don’t think this is really true anymore, since we have much better tooling for discovering research, but it’s a very commonly held attitude among older academics.
Without changing this perception at the subfield level, academic publishing isn’t going to change. Citation counting and h-index ranking just plays too large a role in hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding decisions.
What might help is for an established researcher to publish a splashy important result in a new open venue. It doesn’t happen much because publishing Nature-worthy research in “some upstart open access journal” leaves a lot of prestige and fanfare on the table.
