Will this site take money for academic advertising?

Question

To keep the site active, and to give the folks who are doing the work a revenue stream, perhaps it is possible to allow academic advertising on the site?

There are better avenues for advertising things other than academic papers, I don't mean toothpaste ads. But academic papers sometimes are ignored for no good reason. If the author could pay a modest fee, like 10 to 50 dollars per week, their paper would be put in a prominent position, so it would get a quick referee report, and some attention and feedback. This can allow the site to function as an advertising venue for important work targeted at the appropriate audience, and perhaps this can be useful in allowing the folks who run it to continue indefinitely and independently, including perhaps hiring a programmer or two in the future. If the refereeing on the site gets a good reputation, and it should be easy to exceed the quality on any existing journal, then the revenues can be increased in several obvious ways.

If you want to do this, then it is important to ensure that the academic integrity is preserved, so that no amount of money can influence the refereeing content itself. This is not so difficult to do, since the refereeing is user contributions, and any politically influenced contributions are easily and convincingly rebutted. But perhaps it requires a commitment to not kick out those who criticize good customers?

Just throwing the idea out there. It would be good if there is a revenue stream for the folks running it, even if they have other sources of income, just so that they don't lose heart when the going gets tough (and it will, things like this are difficult to start up).

I can say from experience that academics are desperately in need of any kind of way of advertising papers better than giving talks (when invited) and getting on the cover of nature or science (a handful of times), especially when the work is difficult and mathematical. Mathematical work is the LAST thing people want to advertise in science and nature, many now famous folks languished in obscurity because they didn't have an avenue to advertise their results, some of them lost their positions, and some of them lost their minds. If Scherk and Schwarz could have presented their results in a public way, perhaps string theory wouldn't have been as obscure as it was in the 1970s. I could name thousands of examples. Heck, even I would pay $50 for a week's worth of attention to some papers of mine.

Comments

Can you change " $10 to $50 " to "10 dollars to 50 dollars"? The system is interpreting it as  MathJax.    

Answer 1

While a very good idea, how will such payments be done? There is no payment plugin for Q2A. 

Comments

It's money, you can just have a moderator take it, and do 5 minutes of set-up work. I don't think it's a problem. I think real money bounties are a good idea too, even though everyone else shot it down.

Answer 2

I don't like this idea because it gives adventage to people with more money or those who already have an income from academia. Also, as a matter of fact, unfortunately, people often become dishonest because of money. 

I think that if an author A wants B to review their paper, A may just ask B to review it. They can reach an agreement:

B: Sure, your paper seems very interesting.

or

B: Are you willing to review my paper .... in return?

or 

B: Are you willing to review this paper I am interested in?

I believe that money has the "precious" skill of ruining a lot of things.

Comments

In my view, money is only a problem when people monopolize somethig, or when it interferes with freedom, through imposing it's will on a site. In this case I am pretty sure there is no danger. Academics are egalitarian as all heck, it's not like Polyakov's salary was so much more than your average physicist. The only big money in physics is popularizations, and we're not dealing with that.

Erdos, with his money bounties, showed that money is effective advertizing and does not lead to corruption, rather, when it is small sums, it leads to healthy attention, and a spirit of cooperation. I think it's good to tred down his path.

A successful bounty system can potentially (only in the wildest dreams of the future) replace grants for academics, but a small money-bounty system, and a small academic advertizing system I think can just allow the people here to eat, not much more, it's not like the market is enormous.

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Where is the money supposed to go? Reviewer of the specific paper? Moderators? Who are "the people here"?

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I think that the plan is to have the money go to the site, so as to sponsor hosting and maybe even pay system developers like polarkernel.