Interesting idea to use something like a subreddit as a place to communally filter ("post-publication peer-review") published papers. The problem is, you wouldn't want one-man-one-vote. You'd want established professionals in the field to have a greater upvote/downvote weight than J. Random Ligger. You could imagine a sort of pagerankish scheme where people whose own publications have been upvoted get more more voting power as a result.
> The problem is, you wouldn't want one-man-one-vote.
I agree. Right now the reviewers (= designated experts) have all the votes.
As I think about it, the reviewers achieved that status because they wrote articles that got upvotes from previous reviewers. The first reviewers were historical and they set the standards.
You could end up with a situation where the reviewers were poorly chosen and so upvote complete bullshit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair), but fields of science have a reproducibility clause that provides good amounts of self-correction.
Hmmm. I didn't think your boycott post would lead to an examination of the way science and engineering is published, but the time might well be ripe. That said: My recommendation is to narrow the scope and focus on the boycott. It's enough to keep your plate full for a while.
