Bitcoin, figshare, dropbox, open peer-review and hyperbolic discounting

Thinking out loud about the subject  of models of OA publication

1. which are also open peer-review friendly,
2. which work in the real world,
3. which offer an advantage to the researchers using them,
4. which have  small costs for the initiators.

PeerJ  is such an example, I want to understand why does it work and find a way to emulate it’s success, as quickly as possible.

You may wonder what difference is between 2 (works in real world) and  3(gives advantage to the user). If it gives an advantage to the user than it should work in real life, right? I don’t think so, because the behaviour of real people is far from being rational .

A hypothesis for achieving 2 is to exploit hyperbolic discounting.  I believe that one of the reasons PeerJ works is not only that it is cheaper than PLOS, but it also exploits this human behaviour.

It motivates the users to  review and to submit and it also finances the site (buys the cloud time, etc).

How much of the problem 4 can be solved by using the trickle of money which comes from exploiting hyperbolic discounting? Some experiments can be made.

What else? Let’s see, there is more which intrigues me:

• the excellent figshare   of Mark Hahnel. It’s a  free repository,  which provides a DOI and collects some citation and use data.
• there is a possibility to make blogs on dropbox. I have to understand well, but it seems that Scriptogr.am offers this service, which is an interesting thing in many ways. For example can one use a dropbox blog for sharing the articles, making it easy to collect reactions to them (as comments), in parallel with using figshare for getting a DOI for the article and for depositing versions of the article?
• tools like git.macropus.org/twitter-viewer  for collecting twitter reactions to the articles (and possibly write other tools like this one)
•  what is a review good for? a service which an open review could bring to the user is to connect the user with other people interested in the same thing. Thus, by collecting “social mentions” of the article, the author of the article might contact the interested people.
• finally, and coming back to the money subject (and hyperbolic discounting), if you think, there is some resemblance in the references of an article and the block chains of bitcoin.  Could this be used?

I agree that these are very vague ideas, but it looks like there may be several sweet spots in this 4 dim space

• (behavioral pricing , citing as  block chain)
• (stable links like DOI , free repository)
• (editor independent blog as open article)
• (APIs for collecting social mentions as reviews)

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