I’ve started thinking recently about what it would look like to federate preprint servers. Federation involves a common language between servers to better enable communication and interoperability across multiple servers/services/clients, as opposed to centralization where all of the user connections and interactions occur on the servers of one operator. In social media, Twitter would be an example of a centralized service, where all Twitter users must have accounts with Twitter in order to interact with each other on that platform. Compare this with Mastodon, which provides a Twitter-like experience, but users are not required to have an account from any one provider in order to interact with users on the network, or Fediverse. In this way, users can identify with (create an account on) the server of the community that they feel the most connected to, but regardless of which community they choose they can still interact with users of every other community.

I’ve been thinking lately about what federation might look like in academic publishing. Publishing of academic research is currently a rather archaic system that serves to exploit the labor of researchers and academics, primarily for the financial gain of a few very large publishers. There have been some efforts to retake the publishing infrastructure and create scholar owned systems with varying degrees of success. Would the fediverse enable greater success in such an initiative or would it not make sense in this context?