> Many high school science fair projects would fall into that category.

> Would that be allowed? Or will there be some gating system?

I think that's up for the community decide. There have been high school science projects that got published before and were considered significant contributions.

The idea is that anyone can register - though they will be asked to use their real name. To be determined how to verify that.

> Will you require ORCID?

> Will you allow anonymous users? If so, what prevents nyms from being fly-by nattering nabobs of negativism? SO-style permissions based on rep? Being vouched for by other use

We will integrate with ORCID and provide space to link ones account, but my understanding is that ORCID adoption is still limited (growing, but limited) so we don't want to require it.

Yes, it's an SO style reputation permission system - only tied to the fields you publish in. So when you publish a paper, you gain reputation in the fields you tag it with. That then grants you permission to review and referee papers tagged with the fields you have reputation in.

The current thought is to aim to set the threshold so that a graduate student who's published a few times can review, but the refereeing (voting threshold) would be set closer to late postdoc or early professorship. Possibly higher, to prevent labs from attempting to game the reputation system.

What those numbers are is yet to be determined. The current plan is to initialize the reputation system using citations - 1 citation = 1 upvote, essentially. It's not perfect, but it's the closest analog. That would allow researchers with established records to help seed the community and carry over the reputation they've already earned. This won't work with out that (because no one will have enough reputation to vote). We've got some analysis to do to figure out where the permissions thresholds should lie (and it might turn out that they need to be in a different place in different fields - which complicates the system somewhat, but isn't unmanageable).

> I don't know what to do with my SO or HN rep. As others have pointed out, unless this rep helps/hinders career advancement, I don't think people will care.

Yeah, at this point my SO rep seems kind of pointless too. That said, I'm pretty sure I got one of my first software jobs on the back of my SO rep a decade ago. They kind of squandered that aspect of the site by mismanaging the job board/cv aspect of it. Inspite of that, SO still works. It's still filtering content appropriately, and it's still a very supportive community where you can go and get the help you need. It's still one of the best sources of technical information on the internet. So even though the reputation is little more than internet points, it still seems to be doing its job. Which, to be fair, it was always just a mediator for the permissions system first and foremost.

Where Peer Review is concerned there are kind of two modes of operation to think about (...okay, maybe four).

There's the "Trying to get traction, no one cares about the reputation yet." At that point, the reputation can't do much in terms of incentives (beyond what any internet point endorphin system does). But it's still the system that facilitates matching papers with the appropriate reviewers and referees, it's necessary. It's what allows this to be crowdsourced - that plus the evolutionary field system.

Then there's the "Established, the institutions have started to take the reputation seriously and count it as another citation metric." At that point, it can start to provide incentives. And that's where we can start using it to help encourage good science and counter some of the negative incentives currently built into the system - things like offering reputation bonuses for replications.

The middle ground might be "Just starting to gain traction, where it's not meaningless, but not super meaningful."

I suppose there's a fourth option "Succeeds beyond my wildest dreams" where Peer Review becomes the standard place to publish and we manage to get the entire literature into the database. At that point we can do all kinds of cool things - automating literature reviews, detecting and flagging P-hacking, incentivizing replications.

Somewhere in this growth curve, we hopefully gain enough funding to hire some folks to help detect and counter the bad actors. But as long as they are the minority, the system should be self correcting to a large degree.

My thought for field evolution is that anyone can propose a new field, but they have to propose a parent and some percentage of the users in that field with referee reputation have to approve it (quarter? tenth? with a minimum base number?). That's to prevent small groups with agendas from creating echo chambers.

There's the counter point of adherents of popular ideas can sometimes stifle valid challenges to those ideas at first. But I think ideas tend to be popular (or should be) because they have a certain weight of evidence and theory behind them. And it should be challenging to overthrow those at first. As long as the average actor is a good actor - ie interested first and foremost in the truth and good science and willing to affirm good science that goes against their biases or supports findings they may not like - then this will work out in the long run.

Yes, the part I'm still chewing on is that first stage. Getting traction is the hard part. If it's big enough that people are trying to game it, then hopefully we have enough funding to work to counter that gaming in the areas where the system can't self correct. There's a degree to which trying to foresee what those ways will be now is a little bit pre-mature optimization. The gamers will come up with things we can't think of now, and thinks that seem like they would be obvious problems might turn out to be much smaller issues. Assuming the underlying assumption - that the average actor is a good actor as I defined it early - is true. If it isn't, then yeah, this system is fucked and won't work.