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Today universities employ scientists with taxpayers' money to produce
knowledge that they later submit for free to academic journals
so that big publishers can sell it back to universities and the public
for extortionate subscription fees.
Despite the Open Access movement and increasing international pressure
journals continue to dominate the academic landscape
because by handling the peer review process they've assumed the role of the
gatekeeper of scientific quality.
However traditional peer review, which is also offered for free, is slow, opaque,
prone to bias, and very often of low quality as anonymity prohibits proper
recognition of reviewer contributions.
A second reason is because journals provide citation metrics that scientists
desperately need to compete for grants and positions.
Scientists are therefore being forced to support a knowledge exchange system that
is slow,
exclusive, outdated,
conservative, inefficient, inaccessible, and unreasonably costly.
There is however an alternative that can set knowledge free.
As soon as scientists produce an academic idea
they can immediately post it on a free, online, open-access multi-disciplinary
repository we call LIBRE.
LIBRE then helps authors find suitable reviewers
to provide a formal evaluation for their paper
that will be posted together with the original work.
Reviewers still offer their services for free but now their identities are
disclosed and their reviews are licensed, assigned a digital object identifier
and become citable items like any original scientific contribution.
This offers incentives to write original, high quality and helpful
reviews as they can be rewarded with citations and positive commentaries by
the rest of the community.
Both papers and reviews are then rated by other scientists
and LIBRE calculates and provides holistic multi-parametric indices to rank
authors' and reviewers' performance.
LIBRE is dynamic.
At any time authors may post an updated version of their paper or even send it to
a traditional journal.
LIBRE is collective.
LIBRE provides a set of innovative tools
that harness the collective wisdom of the entire scientific community
to achieve a more efficient organization and dissemination of global research
output.
A viable alternative for a fast, free,
transparent and efficient knowledge exchange system is here.
All we need is to have faith that the scientific community is ready to work
together to liberate research, socialize knowledge and reinvent its role in a
global interconnected society.