Thursday, August 24, 2006

Scientific publications , self advertisement and academic decay

I decided to post my publications on my blogs for a couple of reasons :
its hard to find information you need in research, even with tools like citeseer or google scholar . So allowing them to be easily accessible and most of all find able is not easy. And also its always good for the ego to see its publication refereed somewhere.

But when i think about it , the actual academic system is kind of perverted : teacher / professors , researchers get funded, or get a pay / position raised based on their amount of publication. YES amount , not quality , that leads to a enormous amount of paper with different title layout and a few paragraph changed published for the sake of publishing. Which leads inevitably to bury interesting paper in a mountain of cloned paper.

Why not creating an online repository , maybe using some idea from wikipedia where people submit their paper online , anybody can review it and give its opinion. With a notation system , that conference will use to accept paper ( i was thinking of a digg like system ) . But such a system is not that easy to implement , we need to avoid fraud , rating manipulation etc..
But it will at least deter the dupe and other rehashing of information over and over .

So what do we need for such a system :
  • A wikepedia style of creating topic , sub topic and general description
  • A rating system for paper
  • A comment system for paper
  • A way to enable conference to use the system to review submitted paper and publish them
  • An efficient search function
  • A multilingual support
  • An obligation to provide tools and protocols that can be used to verify the claim ( how many publication claim something and when you ask for a piece of their code they reply that the research is secret or other *^£!^&* excuse ) as well as dataset used.
  • A benchmark library and data sample for experiments
So far tthat's all, i will try to complete the list and come up with a decent description of the overall later.

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