Publishing in a more prestigious journal usually means that your work will be read by a greater number of people. The journal that a paper is published on carries weight on the CV, and it is a relevant parameter for committees reviewing a grant applicant or when evaluating an academic job applicant.

Someone who is able to fund their own research can get away with publishing to a forum, or to some of the Arxivs without submitting to a journal. But an academic that relies on grants and benefits from collaborations is much more likely to succeed in academia if they publish in academic journals. It is not necessarily that academics want to rely on publishers, but it is often a case of either you accept and adapt to the system or you don’t thrive in it.

It would be great to find an alternative that cuts the middle man altogether. It is not a simple matter to get researchers to contribute their high-quality work to a zero-prestige experimental system, nor is it be easy to establish a robust community-driven peer-review system that provides a filtering capacity similar to that of prestigious journals. I do hope some alternative system manages to get traction in the coming years.

That’s really cool, I will use it

I did not know of the term “open washing” before reading this article. Unfortunately it does seem like the pending EU legislation on AI has created a strong incentive for companies to do their best to dilute the term and benefit from the regulations.

There are some paragraphs in the article that illustrate the point nicely:

In 2024, the AI landscape will be shaken up by the EU’s AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI law, with a projected impact on science and society comparable to GDPR. Fostering open source driven innovation is one of the aims of this legislation. This means it will be putting legal weight on the term “open source”, creating only stronger incentives for lobbying operations driven by corporate interests to water down its definition.

[…] Under the latest version of the Act, providers of AI models “under a free and open licence” are exempted from the requirement to “draw up and keep up-to-date the technical documentation of the model, including its training and testing process and the results of its evaluation, which shall contain, at a minimum, the elements set out in Annex IXa” (Article 52c:1a). Instead, they would face a much vaguer requirement to “draw up and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary about the content used for training of the general-purpose AI model according to a template provided by the AI Office” (Article 52c:1d).

If this exemption or one like it stays in place, it will have two important effects: (i) attaining open source status becomes highly attractive to any generative AI provider, as it provides a way to escape some of the most onerous requirements of technical documentation and the attendant scientific and legal scrutiny; (ii) an as-yet unspecified template (and the AI Office managing it) will become the focus of intense lobbying efforts from multiple stakeholders (e.g., [12]). Figuring out what constitutes a “sufficiently detailed summary” will literally become a million dollar question.

Thank you for pointing out Grayjay, I had not heard of it. I will look into it.

Some time last year I learned of an example of such a project (peerreview on GitHub):

The goal of this project was to create an open access “Peer Review” platform:

Peer Review is an open access, reputation based scientific publishing system that has the potential to replace the journal system with a single, community run website. It is free to publish, free to access, and the plan is to support it with donations and (eventually, hopefully) institutional support.

It allows academic authors to submit a draft of a paper for review by peers in their field, and then to publish it for public consumption once they are ready. It allows their peers to exercise post-publish quality control of papers by voting them up or down and posting public responses.

I just looked it up now to see how it is going… And I am a bit saddened to find out that the developer decided to stop. The author has a blog in which he wrote about the project and about why he is not so optimistic about the prospects of crowd sourced peer review anymore: https://www.theroadgoeson.com/crowdsourcing-peer-review-probably-wont-work , and related posts referenced therein.

It is only one opinion, but at least it is the opinion of someone who has thought about this some time and made a real effort towards the goal, so maybe you find some value from his perspective.

Personally, I am still optimistic about this being possible. But that’s easy for me to say as I have not invested the effort!

Jajaja, sí, soy Mexicano 😁

🥳 Muchas gracias!

I think that they are referring to Paxillus involotus

It is quite an interesting mushroom. It was considered “safe to eat” for a long time, but it contains an antigen that a human’s immune system can learn to attack.

The antigen is still of unknown structure but it stimulates the formation of IgG antibodies in the blood serum.

I once looked into whether this immune response builds up over many exposures, or if it is a random event that has a probability of happening for each exposure. I don’t remember finding a convincing answer… If it is a random event, then mushroom could be considered a “Russian roulette” mushroom that will usually provide a nice meal, but, if unlucky, you may experience the following:

Poisoning symptoms are rapid in onset, consisting initially of vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and associated decreased blood volume. Shortly after these initial symptoms appear, hemolysis develops, resulting in reduced urine output, hemoglobin in the urine or outright absence of urine formation, and anemia. Hemolysis may lead to numerous complications including acute kidney injury, shock, acute respiratory failure, and disseminated intravascular coagulation. These complications can cause significant morbidity with fatalities having been reported.

I agree with you that this is probably unrelated to the “generally similar to humans” comment. I feel like this fantasy is a combination of the above fact mixed in with the fact that the Fungi belong to the Opisthokonts, which places them closer to animals than plants, and so they share some interesting cellular characteristics with us. This places them closer to animals than plants, but “generally similar to humans” is perhaps a bit of a stretch ^_

But, it is just a meme about a guy being hyped about mushrooms. Hopefully people don’t expect memes to be super accurate 😁

First of all, congratulations for bringing a baby girl into this world!! You must be really excited! I am very happy for you!

This looks very cool. I set up a wiki (https://ibis.mander.xyz/) and I will make an effort to populate it with some Lemmy lore and interesting science/tech 😄 Hopefully I can set some time aside and help with a tiny bit of code too.

This is what I think, but if anyone understands it differently please correct me.

Vertical scalability refers to scaling within a single instance. More users join and they post more content, increasing the amount of disk space needed to hold that memory, network bandwidth to handle many users downloading comments and images at once, and processing power.

Horizontal scaling refers to the lemmyverse growing because of the addition of new instances. The problem in this form of scaling is due to the resources that an instance has to use due to its interactions with other instances. So, you may create a small instance without a lot of users, but the instance might still need a lot of resources if it attempts to retrieve a lot of information (posts, comments, user information, etc) from the other larger instances. For example, at some point a community in lemmy.ml might be so popular that subscribing to that community from a small instance would be too much of a burden on the smaller instance because of the amount of memory required to save the constant stream of new posts. The horizontal scaling is a problem when the lemmyverse becomes so large that a machine with only a small amount of resources is no longer able to be part of the lemmyverse because its memory gets filled up in a few hours or days.

I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they’ll give up because the bigger instances are closed.

(This is purely my personal opinion, of course!) In the scenario in which a few large instances dominate, the idea of the fediverse failed. One may estimate the likelyhood of success or failure given how they expect humans to behave, but in the end experiment beats theory. I think that for the fediverse to work a significant cultural shift has to occur, but I don’t think that it is an impossible shift. I would like the fediverse to succeed, and so I choose to take part in the experiment.

This also ignores that the system isn’t horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive

Yes, that might cause some serious issues. The project is still in an early-development phase, and I don’t understand the technical aspects well enough yet to be able to identify whether there is obviously a fundamentally invincible barrier when it comes to scalability. My optimistic hope is that the developers are able to optimize horizontal scalability fast enough to meet the demand for scale. If it turns out to be impossible to scale, then only rich enough parties would be able to have viable instances, and that could be a reason for failure.

A small cloud server + a domain name costs less than a Netflix subscription. The developers have taken care to package lemmy in ways that are relatively straight forward to deploy, so a dedicated person with a small amount of experience can have an instance up and running in an evening. As long as a few percentage of users are willing to pay a netflix subscription to keep a server running, the financial burden would be spread.