ative 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 won't depend on the support of senior researchers. It will depend on the support of graduate students and post docs who are passionate about doing the best science they can. Astrobiology and origin of life research investigates some of the deepest, most conceptually challenging questions in science. A new collaborative platform for those communities would allow scientists in those fields to hold themselves to the highest possible standards of peer review. It would allow those fields to be the most open, equitable, and accessible in the scientific community. Peer review has allowed science to achieve the unimaginable year after year. In order to tackle the hardest problems of our time, we need to make peer review work better, and the tools to do it a feasible, we just need to build them.
If you are interested in making these improvements in our fields, please let me know.
Review this piece of writing, tell me what you think, comment below, or contact me directly at email@example.com. I look forward to you're comments and criticism.
 Measures of success. Science, 352(6281):28-30, mar 2016.
 M. Baker. 1, 500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility. Nature, 533(7604):452-454,
 N. Bhalla. Has the time come for preprints in biology? Molecular biology of the cell,
 J. Bohannon. Who's downloading pirated papers? everyone. Science, apr 2016.
 J. Inglis and R. Sever. biorxiv: a progress report., 2016.
 H. Piwowar. Altmetrics: Value all research products. Nature, 493(7431):159-159, 2013.
 A. Plume and D. van Weijen. Publish or perish: The rise of the fractional author.
 R. G. Steen, A. Casadevall, and F. C. Fang. Why has the number of scientic retractions
increased? PloS one, 8(7):e68397, 2013.
 R. Werner. The focus on bibliometrics makes papers less useful. Nature, 517(7534):245-
245, jan 2015.