A common description about Open Science starts with criticizing existing academic journals which are produced by Elsevier and Wiley. According to the plot, the costs for submitting a paper are too high, the fulltext is not available for free and the quality is low. But is a journal really the correct counterpart which has to be improved?
Peer review belongs not the academic publication but is located on higher level. A judgement if a paper is well written or not is made by the liberians who are buying the paper or not. The forefront of the liberary ecosystem is the worldcat org cataloque, which is a bibliography of all the books ever published. Most academic liberies have additionally catalogues for storing single paper and journals which they believe have a high quality. These catalogues should be critized. If a paper metainformation is stored in a liberary catalog than it's a valuable one and vise verca. If the idea is to improve the peer review system and make it more open, then the worldcat org cataloque has to be made obsolete.
What exactly is the process until a paper or a journal is part of a liberary catalog? Some kind of human-in-the-loop decision is made. A long term liberian will read the information and then he believes that the information is important. As a result the metainformation are added to the catalog. The funny thing is, that this decision is not made in a journal from Elsevier but within the academic liberary. If something with the peer review process is wrong, the library has to be blamed.
Let us describe how a library looks in the worst-case. An outdated library is financed by the government, has additionally to the catalog also an archive and is organized as a club in which only professors are allowed to read books. But not newbies without any kind of understanding of Physics. Such a library is a closed world, because it combines many things on the same place. It's a centralized storage in which the content is available, the metainformation are stored and which is regulated by the authority.
Now we can describe the opposite, which is a modern liberary. A modern library is organized decentralized. That means, it contains only the meta-catalog but not the books. It is financed by more than a single source and everybody is welcome. The transition from a monolothic centralized library into an open ecosystem is the key element towards Open Science. What does this mean? In the future, everybody will create his own library catalog, which is working independent from Worldcat org. This allow to judge about existing information more objective. WHich allows to argue, that a certain book which is listed in Worldcat org doesn't make much sense, while another book which is not there is useful.
Such a decentralized bottom up meta-catalog isn't build yet. It has to be created by the public, similar to the Wikipedia project. The idea is to collect information about books and documenting which papers were written in the past.
To investigate what's wrong with Worldcat.org we have to imagine a case in which an author has written a document, has also founded a new predatory journal and new he is trying to submit the paper into the Worldcat.org cataloque. Where is the submit button on the website? Exactly this is the problem, there is no way for a normal author/journal to submit something to the worldcat catalog. The system is not open and only a handful carefully selected longterm editors are allowed to modify the Worldcat.org catalog. The process how this is done was invented decades ago and was never adapted to new requirements. This blocks the complete Open Science movement.
The first thing what Open Science will need is an alternative library catalogue for storing metainformation. This is more important than founding a new Open Access journal. Because the amount of journals and opportunities to publish a paper are better than ever. The bottleneck is located within the library system.
A common misconception is, that Google has made classical library catalogues and web-directories obsolete. No this was never the case. Google is a fulltext search engine and if somebody has found an interesting paper, he has to set a bookmark elsewhere. The place in which bookmarks are stored is similar to a library catalogue. It's an annotated bibliography which is maintained by a community.
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