Introducing Plaudit
Hi all,
For the past few months I've been working with eLife and the Center for Open Science on a new project that I'd like to introduce here. The reason I'm posting this now is because we've just released a browser extension, allowing everybody to give it a try right now.
- Extension page: plaudit.pub/extension
- Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19075164
- Tweet: https://twitter.com/Flockademic/status/1092365381870804993 (there's a Plaudit Twitter account as well: https://twitter.com/PlauditPub)
The main motivation for this project is that we wanted to try and reduce the role of the Journal Impact Factor in the evaluation of researchers, where researchers feel pressured to publish in paywallled or high-APC journals because that's what helps their careers.
We figured that, instead of receiving the "stamp of approval" of being published with a certain journal brand name, signifying that reputable researchers have looked at and approve of the published work, we could remove the middle-man: we directly expose those approvals. Plaudit is a widget that can be embedded by preprint servers and publishers next to the research they publish, which will display which researchers have endorsed a work, and allows readers to add their own endorsements.
For those of you publishing academic works, I'd love to work with you to integrate Plaudit if you're interested, and am obviously available for any questions you might have - just leave a comment here or send me an email at Vincent@plaudit.pub.
For the rest of you, this browser extension will allow you to endorse anything with a DOI that you might encounter online, even at publishers that do not explicitly integrate with Plaudit.
I'd love to hear any suggestions and comments you might have.