Contact Info

If you'd like to join this project, or if you have questions, please contact me at . If you want to say something in the open, please join our discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/gpeerreview/

What is GPeerReview?

Traditional journals provide two services: 1. Find capable reviewers who give feedback, and recommend whether or not the journal should endorse a paper. 1. Publish papers by making them easily accessible to other researchers.

With modern technology, it is no longer necessary for these two services to be tied together. Authors should be able to: 1. Publish now and seek endorsements later. 1. Seek any number of endorsements.

GPeerReview attempts to makes it easy for authors to seek post-publication endorsements of their works. We provide the following tools:

• A command-line tool to digitally sign endorsements (done and available).
• A web-based version of the signing tool (about 70% done).
• Client tools for analyzing endorsement graphs to establish credibility (in planning stages).
• Additional tools to facilitate the running of endorsement organizations (in the brain-storming stages).
• Tools for analyzing citation graphs (in the brain-storming stages).

How Publication Should Work

So, you've got a good idea. You've done some experiments, gathered some results, and written a paper. Now what?

1. The first thing you should do is pre-publish your work. Put your paper, your datasets, scripts, results, etc. on a public server. This does two things: 1- It ensures that science can move rapidly (without waiting for a response from a slow journal), and 2- It protects you from dishonest reviewers who might steal your ideas. (Most reviewers are honest people, but it's always a good idea to protect yourself.) If there is ever any doubt about who originated an idea, the server logs will prove that you published it first. (Will pre-publishing limit your publication options? No. If some journal doesn't permit works that were pre-published, you should not support that journal with your ideas anyway. Such journals will try to lock up your ideas rather than promote them. This is not good for you. Pre-publishing is good for you.)
2. Try to publish in a top-tier journal. A few publications with really good journals will benefit your resume/career much more than a lot of publications with so-so journals. It is well worth the extra effort required to get the endorsement of a respected journal. (Notice that up to this point nothing is different. Now, here comes the new stuff...)
3. Also submit your paper to several big-name endorsement organizations (EO's). An EO is similar to a journal, but it doesn't care whether or not a paper has already been published, it only cares how good the paper is. An EO doesn't publish your paper, it just reviews and (hopefully) endorses your pre-publication copy. The "editor" of the EO will solicit the help of qualified reviewers to review your paper (just like a journal). He/she will coordinate double-blind reviews to ensure fairness. If the EO decides to reject your paper, they send you a private email with suggestions for improvement. If they accept it, they will send you a digitally-signed endorsement. (See more about EOs below.) Your c.v. (resume) should list all the endorsements that you obtain for each of your works. The idea that only the publisher can endorse a work is becoming antiquated. It is perfectly reasonable for many organizations to endorse a paper.
4. Valuable endorsements can also come from respected researchers in your field. Send a humble email to some colleagues who might recognize the merit of your idea and who might be willing to use his/her name to help establish your good idea. (This is what "peer review" was originally intended to mean.) Our web-based tools can make it easy for someone to digitally-sign an endorsement, just by filling out a form on a web page.
5. You already spend a lot of time reading papers by other authors. When you find one with an idea that is less recognized than you think it should be, do the community a service and write an unsolicited endorsement of that paper and send it to the author. (GPeerReview provides tools intended to make this process easy.) Note that your endorsement is not anonymous. It has your name right on it, and it links back to your list of publications. If the author chooses to include your endorsement on his/her resume, you will be effectively "linked" with that author and that idea. This can help to show that you are an active participant in the research community. (It could also work against you, so don't go around endorsing every dumb idea that you find.) Thus, the motivation for researchers to review and endorse each others' works is the same as the motivation for them to write papers. This small evolution to the motivation behind research will help promote a healthy research community that focuses more on recognizing good ideas, and less on publishing for the sake of adding bloat to one's resume.

Endorsement Organizations

An EO is just like a journal, except it doesn't publish your paper. The web page of an EO will link to the pre-publication copies of the papers they endorse. Some of these papers may be published in another journal. That's okay. Multiple endorsements are a good thing. EOs permit two things that journals prohibit: 1. You can publish first and seek endorsements later. 1. You can seek multiple endorsements.

An EO is slightly easier to create than a journal, because it doesn't require a super-reliable server, or a lot of money, or a legal team. When an EO endorses a paper, it will send the author a digitally-signed endorsment. This digital signature can be verified even if the EO goes offline, or goes bankrupt and disappears completely, so the author is protected. The EO can let the author publish the paper wherever he/she wants because the digitally-signed endorsement will no longer validate if the author changes the paper, so the digital signature also protects the EO from authors who might try to sneak in new changes that the EO doesn't necessarily endorse. Since the EO actually serves no copyrighted material, most of the legal complications with publication are non-existent.

At this point, you might ask: "Where can I find an EO?" Good question. There aren't many (any?) yet, but there is a clear need for them. If you're thinking about starting a new journal in your area of research, perhaps you might consider starting a new EO instead. We will do our best to help jump-start your new EO by providing the tools you will need. (If you need any free tools that we don't provide, please contact us, so we can remedy that deficiency.)

When people begin to think about the idea of obtaining post-publication endorsements, many of them start to become excited about dropping journals completely from the publication process. Will that really happen? It doesn't matter. As long as journals provide useful services, they will continue to exist. When better services come along, journals will either learn to adapt or the better services will take over. Either way, publication will become better from the perspective of the researchers. If you operate an existing journal, we encourage you to consider taking a few steps to become more like an EO, for the benefit of your research community. Here are some positive changes you can make: * Start giving your authors digitally-signed endorsements that they can display on their resumes. * Provide free hyperlinks to an author's pre-publication copy of the paper. * Stop rejecting papers just because another journal already endorses them. (Historically, this reasoning was used to avoid copyright infringement, but you can avoid this problem by simply providing a hyperlink to already-published papers, instead of the actual paper itself. A hyperlink is just as useful to your readers. Most of them won't even notice the difference.)

Graph Analysis

There are already so many journals that it can be difficult to determine the credibility of a particular journal. As EOs become more prominent, and as big-name researchers start adding their own endorsements, this problem only becomes worse. Fortunately, this problem is easily solved with graph analysis techniques. (This is another reason why it is important for journals and EOs to digitally sign their endorsements.) A digitally-signed endorsement links back to the endorser's site. Thus, a big graph/network is naturally formed that reflects the structure of the research community. This graph can be analyzed with fully-automated tools to establish credibility.

Strictly speaking, the digital signatures aren't entirely necessary because one can always just visit the joural or EOs website to see if they really endorse a particular paper, but this isn't friendly to automated analysis. Digital signatures enable computers to do automatic checking. Not every endorsement carries significant weight. Some endorsements mean a lot. Some endorsements mean almost nothing. (For example, if an author creates a journal or an EO for the purpose of promoting his own paper, that endorsement is obviously worthless. This can be easily detected because respected researchers don't list the endorsement of that organization on their resume.)

Now, let's be more specific about how an automated computer program might determine how well-connected a particular endorser is with the research community. One analysis algorithm might work as follows:

1. Seed the analysis with a set of well-established researchers in the field. (These might include the chaired professors at your university and a few other researchers who are known for their high-impact ideas.)
2. Use a max-flow/min-cut algorithm to determine the smallest set of endorsements that must hypothetically disappear in order to completely sever the individual being analyzed from the research community.
3. The sum strength of these hypothetically severed reviews now serves as an indication of how well-connected that individual is with the research community (which is defined by the set of seed individuals that you picked).

Of course, this is not the only graph-analysis technique available. There are numerous algorithms and metrics for measuring the connectedness, centrality, or other aspects of an individual's relation to a community. You can design your analysis technique to emphasize the things that you think are important. Thus, there is no single magic formula that can be gamed!

Ultimate Goal

We intend for the peer-review web to do for scientific publishing what the world wide web has done for media publishing. As it becomes increasingly practical to evaluate researchers based on the reviews of their peers, the need for centralized big-name journals begins to diminish. The power is returned to those most qualified to give meaningful reviews: the peers. As long as big journals provide a useful service, this tool will only enhance their effectiveness. But as far as they don't, we can move forward without them.

GPeerReview, seeks to promote a world where you can: * Publish immediately (and get reviews later), * Seek an unlimited number of reviews, * Verify the integrity of the reviews, * Verify the credibility of the reviewers, * Publish without limitation on format, style, or number of pages, * Maintain complete copyright ownership of your works, and * Enhance the acclaim of your already-published works.

Please click on the "wiki" tab for more information about GPeerReview.