Financial Cryptography: Open Publication experiments

May 18, 2005

Open Publication experiments - FC++ and JIE

Judging by the private comments I have received, Advances in Financial Cryptography (FC++) has worked well. I now have a potential list of 3 more papers ready for distro!

Question now is how to proceed. I'm open to comments on this; I see these options to publish:

with N entries, where today's N is three,
on a given date (like the fourth tuesday before the new moon).
on demand when a new paper turns up,
batch-wise when the overworked underpaid editor gets around to it.

It mostly depends on what works for readers, authors and reviewers, let me know (privately as desired). One short term factor is that there is a bit of a backlog of papers for review, so versatility might be needed.

David Friedman's Journal of Interesting Economics is an alternate forum for more economics oriented papers. A couple of questions spring to mind.

Presumably the copyright is owned by the author, even when published there, but does the JIE take on the "first publication" title? That is, would either David or the editor of another (paper) journal consider this as prior publication? It was specifically to answer this that I couched our FC++ as a pre-review forum, with explicit encouragement to go on to the next stage, "real publication" whatever that may be.

Secondly, David talks about adding a rating system, and I wasn't able to see that, but it would be good to see how that went. My own view is that rating systems are tough; and I'm going to stick to encouraging people to go free form on comments. People here have shown themselves to do so, and they haven't held back through politeness. That's good, as healthy criticism is essential.

Having said all that, maybe there is a view towards a rating system in the future. Here's one thought: A comments currency. Hypothetically, someone making a comment could earn points for making comments, and a paper author could award some as well for value. Citations could earn more points.

Academics might point out that research should not be so crassly monetarised, to which I'd point to the current tendency to measure all academic work by citations and papers published. Maybe the benefit of this system is that it is such a filtered and inefficient money, as when one focuses in too closely on the citations count, this creates a sort of "winner's curse".

Oh, and news just in, JIBC has published its "Spring issue." My article "Phishing - what it is and how it will eventually be dealt with" is in there. Could be useful if you need a fairly compressed, managerial update on the subject.