I would like to start some kind of academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.
Ok, your next task is to figure out a way to make academics gain status by participation in that plan. :)
That is the heart of the social engineering problem at hand.
Programmers gain status by creating and contributing to open source projects, and by answering questions on StackOverflow, etc. I think that is a stable equilibrium, both for programmers and for academics. The question is how to get to that equilibrium in the first place.
First, I think it needs to become generally accepted that the current equilibrium is broken and that there are alternatives. To that end I encourage all academics to discuss it as openly as possible. Once that happens I think (hope) it will just be a matter of high status individuals throwing their weight around properly.
Seconding the recommendation of following the Open Source model, particularly Stack Overflow. I’m also a big fan of the many OSS-focused IRC channels, where you’ll typically be able to find grouchy-but-helpful people to advise you on the fine points of nearly any nearly piece of software.
Ok, your next task is to figure out a way to make academics gain status by participation in that plan. :)
That is the heart of the social engineering problem at hand.
Programmers gain status by creating and contributing to open source projects, and by answering questions on StackOverflow, etc. I think that is a stable equilibrium, both for programmers and for academics. The question is how to get to that equilibrium in the first place.
First, I think it needs to become generally accepted that the current equilibrium is broken and that there are alternatives. To that end I encourage all academics to discuss it as openly as possible. Once that happens I think (hope) it will just be a matter of high status individuals throwing their weight around properly.
An ‘open-source science’ original-research version of Wikipedia, perhaps? With everything explicitly licensed under an attribution-required copyright?
Edit—please disregard this post
Seconding the recommendation of following the Open Source model, particularly Stack Overflow. I’m also a big fan of the many OSS-focused IRC channels, where you’ll typically be able to find grouchy-but-helpful people to advise you on the fine points of nearly any nearly piece of software.