HN Reader

Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

Hey HN! I went to an ATProto meetup last week, and as a burnt-out semi-academic who hates academic publishing, I thought there might be a cool opportunity to build on Octopus (https://www.octopus.ac/), so I got a bit excited over the weekend and built Octosphere.

Hopefully some of you find it interesting! Blog post here: https://andreasthinks.me/posts/octosphere/octosphere.html

Are you aware of the current efforts by researchers on Bluesky to build a new researchers platform on ATProto? (Forget the project name at the moment)

If not, same handle over there, I can get you in touch with them. Or hit up Boris, he knows everyone and is happy to make connections

There's also a full day at the upcoming conference on ATProto & scientific related things. I think they com on discourse more (?)

3 days agoby verdverm

I am afraid that gatekeeping is partially essential and somewhat desired, as an academic you don't have time to read everything and some sort of quick signals, albeit very flawed, can be useful to stop wasting time reading crappy science. If you don't gatekeep you will get a lot of crappy papers or papers that mention the same thing and it will waste more time from people that wish to get a quick sense of the state of a topic/field from quality work. An open source voting system would be easily abused, so it will end up to be trusting a select service of peer reviewers or agencies. Especially if a paper includes a lot of experiments and figures that can be somewhat complicated or overwhelming. What do think?

3 days agoby Murskautuminen

@criomsoneer: Check out Open Science Network (Bonfire), they are also doing interesting work in this space! https://openscience.network/

3 days agoby rsolva

Yes publishing is broken, but academics are the last people to jump onto platforms...they never left email. If you want to change the publishing game, turn publishing into email.

3 days agoby 11101010010001

Integrate them peer review process and you’ve got a disrupter

3 days agoby gnarlouse

Nothing based on DOIs and OCRIDs will ever be properly decentralised.

You need content addressing and cryptographic signatures for that.

3 days agoby j-pb