[kkfx]

A small proposal: why not a PopcornTime of papers? Witch means a distributed network (no matter if BitTorrent, ZeroNet, GNUNet, I2P or something else) to publish? That's the best freedom guarantee and just the mere number of nodes with a paper is a good metric about it's popularity, to avoid oblivion each uni/researcher can easily store and serve their own papers forever: files are small, so download is quick, not much resources are needed.

[PeterisP]

What problems does it solve for the authors? The features you describe above don't seem a problem in the current solutions; freedom and availability is a non-issue for authors, "to avoid oblivion each uni/researcher can easily store and serve their own papers forever" is a flaw not a feature (there are already far too many ways to do that, which only add extra burden to the authors if they want to "be everywhere" for the sake of availability), it doesn't seem that it would be easier than the current way; the resources/effort needed would be small but non-zero, so it sounds like just an extra annoyance, not something beneficial.

And if it solves some problems for someone else but not the authors, then how would a comprehensive majority of papers enter the system? Papers are even less interchangeable than movies; if you want to have a particular movie and it isn't available on PopcornTime, you might watch something else, for papers you just have to go elsewhere that actually does have everything.

[pasadenasunset]

This would and should be terrifying to any mid-career academic. The last thing needed is a complicated solution that solves no direct problem, YET offers plenty of "metrics" that one can attach all sorts of labels to, like "popularity".

Can you imagine some of the minds on academic Twitter holding a poll on article popularity? <SHUDDER> Leave science to the foul-tempered misanthropes, I say! j/k

[kkfx]

There is actually a direct problem, the same problem most people have and do not know until it bite that they have. For almost all is named "cloud", for Science is named reliance third party data, publications, that today might be accessible from someone else computer, tomorrow we do not know BUT we might still need them tomorrow, especially data and publications about big and discussed things, scandals involving big enterprises, governments etc

Actually too many trust that what's available today will be available in ten years, but such trust in IT terms is named a big weakness, our entire history if only digital on someone else computer is at risk of being easy changed in the future. For science that need is as bigger and in theory scientist should be smart and acculturated enough to comprehend.

I can imagine, for instance that in ten years a scandal about a today new drug emerge, and in ten years original trial evidence is gone, on purpose and the scandal became then polemics just because there's nothing to really analyze so no one can really tell what happen.

I can imagine, in shorter time, that a day a scientist from a certain country found it's "own" paper collection along all it's notes, stored on some cloud reference manager gone, perhaps because his/her country have political disagreement with the cloud provider country or because it's university can't pay anymore access to such private and high-price platform.

If just we REALLY want peer review we can't even trust public places like HAL, we need to have data in our own hands, since they quickly became too much the sole alternative is having them on a distributed network where anyone hold some data and it's hard to believe a cartel to erase/temper them with a sufficiently large number of known nodes (like scientist authenticating themselves with GNUPG/PGP signatures with the relevant PKI infra and cross-signed keys behind.