lity of peer review. If we can establish a means to credit reviewers (in an easily quantifiable manner) for their contributions, everyone will benefit.
While preprints are not always peer reviewed, they provide free and open access to articles which have been subjected to peer reviewed. This is because most journals, including Nature, Science and PNAS, allow submissions of articles which have been posted to preprint servers. There is a demand among scientists for easier access to all types of articles. This demand is evidenced by the wide spread use of the scientific piracy cite Sci-Hub . It appears that even academics with institutional access are using the the site, which blatantly violates a number of intellectual property policies, because it is easier, more convenient and more intuitive than accessing the articles through publishers. While this is clearly a missed opportunity on the part of journals and publishers, it demonstrates that scientists are craving access to content quickly and conveniently. Preprints provide access in this manner, and they are easily searchable via common search engines such as Google Scholar, which helps authors increase (legal) visibility of their work, without having to foot the bill for an open access journal.
How can we exploit the opportunities to solve the problems?
It is becoming clear that there is a demand for new modes of scientific discourse. The current journal-centric paradigm in place is slowing down peer review and limiting access to scientific content, while devaluing diligent and constructive peer review. Arxiv.org is a clear example of the power and utility of preprints, but widespread adoption of preprints alone will not solve some of these key problems. Scientists need to be incentivised to critique and improve other people's work. In order to do that, scientific articles must be easily accessible, and scientists must be able to communicate rapidly and freely.
I suggest that astrobiologists and origin of life researchers work together to develop a new collaborative platform (perhaps here on SAGANet.org) which will allow users post preprints and interact with peers, by reviewing and reproducing results. This new platform would provide easy access to preprints, as well as new metrics to evaluate scientists. A reputation system would need to be put in place to track the contribution of individual scientists. Such a system could identify users area's of expertise (from the perspective of the community), as well as the number of experiments and results they've confirmed and the quality of the comments and suggestions they've provided to their peers. A reputation system of this type could extend beyond experiments and articles to include contributions to databases, and software platforms, allowing for enhanced collaboration throughout all aspects of scientific work . This platform could be an extension of SAGANet to accommodate a reputation system. Stack Exchange, is a very successful platform which hosts question and answer forums, and utilizes an effective reputation reward system. While the goals of a peer review platform would be very different from Stack Exchange, we could learn a lot from the lessons of that site. The preprints could either be hosted on a new Astrobiology/OoL server as well, or they could be hosted on an existing preprint server. ArXiv.org has a developing API and a quantitative-biology category, which might appeal to the physical scientists already in using arxiv. While this technical details of this endeavor will be undoubtedly complicated, the tools and techniques are out there.
Beyond any technical or logistic challenges presented by establishing this type of platform, there will be a huge social challenge. We will have to convince scientists to reveal their work prior to publication, which is still a major hurdle in many fields. We will have to convince other scientists to review and recreate others experiments whenever possible. This will not be easy. However, it won't require the support of any institution, university, or funding agency and it 