&quot;by giving users the ability to rate a scientific paper.&quot;<p>LOL! No. Ratings are nearly useless. By which I mean I don&#x27;t know how I would incorporate ratings into my own research.<p>How do you keep a ratings system from being a proxy for popularity, rather than a measure of novelty or utility? How do you keep it from being easily gamed? Does a &quot;5.2&quot; for a 1995 paper have the same meaning as a &quot;5.2&quot; for a 2010 paper?<p>&quot;You want peer recognition so why not go to your peers directly instead of a proxy like these publications&quot;<p>Do tell me how. Post on my blog and hope people come across it?<p>Journals outsource marketing. Get rid of journals and something must replace that service, or I have to become a marketer.<p>&quot;This system is a product of a bygone era .. relying on copyright&quot;<p>You are mistaken. The system does not rely on copyright. The scientific publication system dates from the 1600s, dated from Oldenburg&#x27;s &#x27;Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society&#x27;. Copyright dates from the 1700s, dated from the Statute of Anne.<p>The scientific publication system depends on reliable selection and curation. Its current form is dominated by large publishing companies which use copyright law for revenue generation, but that&#x27;s only been true for the last few decades. Scientific publication also existed in the USSR even without copyright protection. (article 103(2) according to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Union" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Un...</a> gave &quot;permission to reproduce published scientific, artistic, or literary works as excerpts (or even entirely) in scientific, critical, or educational publications&quot;).<p>&quot;most of these papers were made with public funding so there shouldn’t be any copyright on it to begin with the copyright belongs to the public domain they payed for it.&quot;<p>I understand and sympathize with your argument. But in practice things aren&#x27;t so clear cut. Rarely does the money come 100% from public sources. Is your argument that even 1 cent of public funding means the entire work product must be in the public domain?<p>Are you making the moral argument that copyright should to the funding source? Or is it limited only to public funding sources? For example, if 100% of the money for a project comes from the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, then do you want the foundation to control the copyright the work product? What if it&#x27;s 80% Gates and 20% public funded? Is it public domain then?<p>If 3 years of research was publicly funded, and resulted in paper, and 2 more years was privately funded by BigCorp., to analyze the data further, then must that additional two years also be in the public domain?<p>And on and on. Unless &quot;1 cent =&gt; public domain always&quot;, then there&#x27;s no clear line. Is that your argument?<p>(BTW, there is another clear line - work by a US government employee is in the public domain. A small percentage of the scientific papers are in the public domain because of that.)