Previously used by scientists from:
It was expected that the internet would disrupt scientific publishing The internet was created with the aim to disrupt scientific publishing. It actually disrupted many other industries, but not scientific publishing, which still uses traditional business models. The industry is dominated by a oligopoly of large publishing houses with profit margins approaching 40%, while scientists freely provide the content and its peer review. The classical publishing system bundles several functions: archiving, registration, dissemination, and certification. Out of these, the arrival of the internet commoditized the first three ones, with the main value remaining in providing certification - asessing contributions and giving “stamps of approval.”
We attempted to unbundle the publishing system As an alternative or complement to the traditional pre-publication peer review organized by publishers, the certification function can be performed by post-publication ratings and reviews provided by the scientists that read the publications anyhow for their own research. Epistemio provided a platform for aggregating such ratings and reviews. As a source of immediate revenue, Epistemio also provided an online service allowing institutions to easily manage and showcase the lists of publications authored by their scientists.
The social inertia of the academic system is too high for this While there are many improvements of the academic system made possible by current technologies, social inertia prevents the adoption of optimal practices: for example, if there is no immediate recognition of the ratings and reviews on Epistemio, individual scientists are not motivated to invest even little time for publishing them. Without powerful organizations to coordinate change, as in the case of standards like Crossref and ORCID, scientists are unable to spontaneously coordinate to adopt new practices. Epistemio ran out of funding before getting a significant number of ratings or reviews.