[__MatrixMan__]

It still wouldn't be perfect, but I'd like to see a system that rewarded publishers and authors for coming up with work that was a load bearing citation for other work (by different authors on different publishers, i.e. ones with no ulterior motive for having chosen it as a source).

Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.

[swiftcoder]

You know, we briefly had this with the h-index, and now h-index manipulation is so rife that it is no longer highly correlated with successful academic careers

[__MatrixMan__]

I see, I hadn't seen the h-index before. I guess that's Goodhart's law for you.

There's got to be ways to improve things though.

[_jsmh]

I built something like this but it didn't get users. Replying to an author for the valuable info they posted would pay the author and it also accepted public payments.

An AI or search engine that identified the value of a contribution and paid the author directly from advertising money based on query traffic could be a way to solve this.

[__MatrixMan__]

I can imagine that adoption was hard to achieve gradually. I figure you'd need a bunch of universities to get together and all at once say to the publishers:

> The only way we'll pay you ever again is through {the protocol}, deal with it.

If people just sought out and participated in better incentive alignment under the expectation that things would be better if only everybody did so... Well then things would already be better and we wouldn't be dreaming these dreams in the first place.