[auggierose]

> Upvotes, downvotes, and commentary? That's extremely complicated.

No, it is not. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Zenodo is centralized, and that is fine. A system hosted by CERN would be universal enough for most purposes.

The truth is, most papers cannot stand on their own, they need a reputable venue. While it is difficult to get into Nature, it is much more difficult to actually contribute something substantial to science. That's why we don't have a system like that.

[fc417fc802]

I think you've misunderstood me. Did you read my final paragraph? I was agreeing with what you wrote there - that simply rethinking how centralized journals operate could accomplish the majority of the goal while sidestepping most of the complexity.

That said, I disagree that papers require a centralized venue in any fundamental sense. They currently need such a venue because we don't have a better process for vetting and filtering them at scale. The issue is that decentralizing such a process in an acceptable manner is a monstrously complicated prospect.