Bycelium

Before academia took over, people were publishing right away without gatekeeping.

Because their credibility was at stake, they took it upon themselves to have sound arguments and claims, at that time credibility mattered more than number of citation or h-index that were nonexistent.

Then people would answer with rebuttal studies or would confirm the claims in follow-up experiments, making replication a central piece of research.

This is just an example of working alternative to today's peer-review system, it wouldn't scale to today's number of scientists.

Of course it did not fit the business model of journals and it did not give a quantitative metric of reputation, thus people switched to counting citations, and peer-review had to be introduced to 'prevent' bad citations.

But as we all know it doesn't prevent anything, worst it creates an incentive to publish more and more instead of publishing quality work, leading to the rise of predatory journals and paper mills.

Now peer-review is so established as 'golden standard' that we forgot other ways are even possible...

Let's rethink our scientific system for the best!

It is possible to build a system robust to intentional attacks from individuals and small groups (for example decentralized finance).

Here because of the mechanism of contributor's credibility, we have a defensive mecanism that allows us to increase the cost of gaming the system.

Trying to cheat, and doing bad reviews, would lower your credibility and reduce how much your reviews impact the community.

Once you have a defensive mechanism like this, it is just a matter of tweeking the equation to make it more expensive to cheat than the money you would get anyway.

In comparison, the current citation system only has retraction as a defensive mecanism, and we all know how well it works at dissuading misconduct.

This is why the current system can be gamed by single individuals and even worst by small groups of researchers citing themselves in circle.

Rome was not built in one day for sure!

Truth is discontent for the current system is so high and the pressure given by language model will push it to its breaking limit.

We also need a system that will self-sustain financialy, it's the only way it could grow worldwide.

Now is the opportunity to rethink the system with better incentives and AI-compatible.

Yes! We would love to collaborate with anyone that want to push bayesian science!

This includes Universities, non-profit and for-profit organisations. If you want to partner in any way, contact us!