I'm all for research papers being made more open and available, rather than hidden away through paid-for journals --- this is in my opinion one of the worst parts of how knowledge is shared. However, I'm not sure that making the papers actually able to be modified through a platform like this will make research more accessible or authentic, at least without changing virtually everything else about how science is done in academic institutions.
If the content of a paper changes over time, it becomes more difficult to reference that paper. You now have to include both the paper and something which identifies which version of the paper you read. This is possible of course, but is a fairly big inconvenience for mostly stupid reasons, such as various citation styles not allowing hyperlinks of any form. There is also the possibility of the content of a paper changing completely, though we should hope that people would use a tool like this sensibly and it wouldn't be an issue.
This proposed platform puts a burden on the authors of the paper to maintain a paper indefinitely. Of course, any paper you author you are at least partially responsible for, and any legitimate errors should concern you. However, having to keep up with many comments and/or critiques after a paper is published would be very tiring. The metrics by which academics are measured for their employment are heavily biased towards publishing a lot of papers, and having to spend a lot of time curating old work would be detrimental to anybody's career. (These metrics are also a reason that people would rather write a new paper to build on the old, rather than incorporating it into an existing work). Another issues is papers with many authors: do they all need to agree on a change to have it merged? How often do you want to try to contact 10 people in 4 different timezones to debate about minor changes to old research?
I also don't really understand how a system like this would address the problem of fraudulent papers in a better way than is done today, which (as far as I am aware) is academics contacting journals to get the papers retracted.
I don't think it's a bad idea, but it is so far away from how people publish today that many things (journals, metrics, work loads) are against you.
I think the exact tools used are irrelevant to the discussion. If this style of publishing + maintaining older papers became popular, hopefully some better tools would spring up.
For what it's worth, I think tools like ShareLaTeX and the like are much more usable for tracking changes in documents and enabling collaboration, especially with coauthors with little programming experience.
LaTeX and git are great for people who have invested the time to learn it. Any platform that will be successful for research collaboration could include these, but has to make the entry costs absolutely nil.
You could use indexes and web hooks or some sort of pubsub mechanism to auto notify researchers when a specific piece of text they referenced is changed.
I don't think that the technical challenges of notifying people are relevant here. The very fact that you would have to update your own research because something you referenced changed is kind of insane to consider. You now not only have the burden of maintaining your own research, but also staying up to date with changing prior research, and all of this work is not recognised by the institution that employs you.
If you reference something that turns out to be incorrect due to poor data or whatever, and it gets corrected surely you would want to update your paper?
For sure, I would want to. But with how institutions currently asses and pay researchers, it would be detrimental to my career to take the time required to understand the change and update my own work, which might involve dredging up years-old data and tools, contacting collaborators around the world (some of whom might have moved completely out of academia and therefore have no interest in all in maintaining work), getting them to agree on a change, etc. It might not even be possible to update my work - maybe a piece of apparatus would take too long to rebuild, or maybe the change requires that I change my entire experimental approach. It's a lot of work to do research and write a paper, and that's why there is such a massive focus on doing it once and doing it well.
I think its infeasible for various reasons to have people maintain old work in the way suggested in the original comment. Who is responsible for it, especially if the authors have moved institutions (which happens very regularly, especially for young researchers), or out of research entirely? Perhaps there could just be a shorter window in which the work could be looked at and changed if required, and after that it is frozen forever. But that actually sounds a lot like (a more open version of) the current peer-review-then-publish system.
It sounds like you’re imaging errors propagating through citations. Paper X cites paper Y, which in turn cites paper Z, so if there is an error in Z, X and Y are—-or should be assumed to be--invalid.
It doesn’t work like that. A few citations may be “critical” but a lot of them provide context and credit. Jones et al. first identified this problem. Smith tested several obvious but ultimately unsuccessful approaches. Here, we use the same methods as Wu and Lee. Our results differ from Cantorovich because....
Errors in those papers might make sections of the citing paper superfluous or less interesting but they don’t invalidate it. For ideas and methods, it might not even matter what the ultimate result was....
If the content of a paper changes over time, it becomes more difficult to reference that paper. You now have to include both the paper and something which identifies which version of the paper you read. This is possible of course, but is a fairly big inconvenience for mostly stupid reasons, such as various citation styles not allowing hyperlinks of any form. There is also the possibility of the content of a paper changing completely, though we should hope that people would use a tool like this sensibly and it wouldn't be an issue.
This proposed platform puts a burden on the authors of the paper to maintain a paper indefinitely. Of course, any paper you author you are at least partially responsible for, and any legitimate errors should concern you. However, having to keep up with many comments and/or critiques after a paper is published would be very tiring. The metrics by which academics are measured for their employment are heavily biased towards publishing a lot of papers, and having to spend a lot of time curating old work would be detrimental to anybody's career. (These metrics are also a reason that people would rather write a new paper to build on the old, rather than incorporating it into an existing work). Another issues is papers with many authors: do they all need to agree on a change to have it merged? How often do you want to try to contact 10 people in 4 different timezones to debate about minor changes to old research?
I also don't really understand how a system like this would address the problem of fraudulent papers in a better way than is done today, which (as far as I am aware) is academics contacting journals to get the papers retracted.
I don't think it's a bad idea, but it is so far away from how people publish today that many things (journals, metrics, work loads) are against you.