Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

Honest question: why don't researchers normally do this? Those in the software development do this all the time: set up a tumblr/Wordpress/whatever blog and publish our findings. If I had a dime for every time I saw an article about some benchmark of tech X vs Y...

If every research lab ran a blog-type setup where they published their findings (along with any other updates), the whole field could be revolutionized. The general public would have much more direct access to what the researchers are working on. We could even add the ability to donate to the researchers directly. This would hopefully foster collaboration as well. Instead of waiting for someone to come out with a paper to find out what they've been up to (unless you have a very close relationship with the particular researcher), you can just read their tweet/blog post/etc a la "tried sample X, results negative, but this is weird..."

Combined with a research semantic markup (think OpenGraph but for scientific concepts), this could be linked into searchable databases. Peer review could be built in, maybe even via public key crypto: "this article is signed by 17 trusted researchers".

This saves everyone money: no more having to subscribe to expensive research publications. You could have for-hire scientific editors built in as a service too. Every time you publish a paper you run it by an editor, but the editor now works for you; or you don't, and you just publish the paper and let the world decide if it is any good.

The platform itself would probably have to be fairly extensive. We would want it to be distributed so that anyone can run their own system if they choose. We'd also want to have some more centralized hubs of this type, analogous to GitHub/Bitbucket. These might include easy access to for-hire editors, Tex/LaTex support, etc. There should also be a default license for the content. Perhaps an extension of Creative Commons but with specific provisions for the peculiarities of this field.

My premise here is that while there is a whole lot of institutions that attempt to enable collaboration, they do often just get in the way. However, from what I've seen of researchers, they have the same mentality as the software developers: they want to share their findings with the largest possible audience and don't really care about much else. I think if it was easy to do this type of setup many would go along with it. What do others think?

Edit: a nice side-effect of this could be that you don't have to be associated with an academic institution to publish. Currently, I could learn, say, all there is to know about quantum physics by reading all sorts of publications and material that is more or less freely available. I could then theoretically come up with something brand new, but couldn't get my voice heard since I am not a research professor at an institution. However, with this system graduates of the likes of the Khan Academy could have the same access to publishing and peer review.

AFAIK it's two-prong.

1. A lot of people criticize self-published work on no other grounds ("not peer reviewed, won't read") 2. Peer-review and citation statistics are part of the bureaucratic game of career-academia.

There seems to be a pretty huge resistance to the old publishers and terms though, with more and more stuff going out in open-access journals.

Aaron's death will probably accelerate the change.

How many magazines about Ruby on Rails or MySQL do you read? You know that highavailabilty.com is more credible than some guy named FunkySysAdmin on a random forum. Yes, there is (much) less rigor in software development publishing than in scientific, but I think the basic model might work. Social networks such as HN help you find the right blogs. Also, researchers already have social connections. During my short stint in research as an undergrad, I was amazed at how many social connections my lab had around the world. I also found it interesting that when we published papers we made a point of emailing the PDF's to other researchers that might be interested. Through this mechanism we also often got early access to papers that were about to be published.

You know what would (probably) really be a tribute to Aaron Swartz?

Run a Tor exit node in an academic network that is blessed by JSTOR, Springer, etc.

Make a website that surveys which exit nodes are in these blessed networks and turns any URL for a paywall into a rendering using that exit node to access the paywall.

Let professors, students, and staff stand with Aaron by running exit nodes that are configured to only connect to paywalls on their systems.