Ask HN: Social micropayment system for scientists?

[rfnslyr]

I always see papers being posted and a lot are behind large paywalls or only available to certain schools, or only available through large publishers with shit sites and huge prices which I assume the scientist doesn't see any of.

Does something like this exist? I want to make access to journals and discoveries easier while at the same time awarding those scientists.

This could be great for grad students and the like. However, I have no experience with this. I'm not even done my undergrad and I'm not in science so I have no idea how publication works.

My goal is to develop a site where users can upload their papers. Readers can setup a daily/weekly/monthly budget with bitcoin/real money and whatever they read, a percentage of that money they have in their "wallet" would be divided by the number of papers/articles they read.

How do you feel about this HN? I know Flatrr exists which is similar, but I want to target the science community and integrate bitcoin as well.

[Wouter33]

A nice idea to disrupt the scientific publishing scene. One problem with your idea. I don't know if you have an understanding of the process of publishing a paper? But every researcher publishes his or her paper through a journal. These journals have panels of reviewers who check them and after that the publisher publishes them in the journal (or not). Getting your paper published in respected journals reflects on your status as a researcher. Most of the journals are owned by some big companies who put them behind a paywall.

So you can try to create a platform for paper publishing at a low cost. But researchers don't get the peer reviews they normally get and the publicity they get in a "big" journal. Uploading them to your platform as a secondary platform would not be allowed by the journals they publish to. So that's the flaw in your plan.

[Irishsteve]

I know its not ideal, but you can try searching for hte journal / article on scholar.google.com , this will point you towards a PDF of the work if it exists somewhere on the internet (Conference / Journal site, Author uploaded themselves, Piracy etc.)