I favour a centralised approach for record-keeping, but a decentralised approach for paper storage, if that makes any sense.
E.g. if I were Emperor and could tear it all down and start again, we'd have either some kind of peer-to-peer network that maintained the paper bodies, and a centralised, institution-funded library of links (like SCOPUS/WoK/Google Scholar/ResearchGate but singular and funded by institution subscription) that is a central go-to for finding papers.
Then the links from that link library go to the P2P solution. For P2P, along the lines of Napster/TPB - torrents essentially, with nodes hosted by volunteers, universities etc.
We could potentially host copies of our own papers instead - I do, and be damned to the copyright etc - but as a sibling comment suggests, this is going to be unreliable and not sustainable in the long-term as sites die etc.
In terms of centralised tools, Google are doing a good job with Scholar but issues I've found are an absence of many older papers (pre-60s is a nightmare to find) and of course Google being Google, they're apt to set light to it all on a whim. They aren't reliable long-term custodians.
Technology can shift the costs and mentality around record keeping. This is exciting and certainly part of the story.
A specific concern about distributed / decentralized storage and network technology —- it shifts. When it does, it is not as simple as one centralized org doing an upgrade or migration or transition. So WRT decentralized tech, what will it take to keep it accessible and maintained under realistic futures?
For long-term archival, technology choices are insufficient. They matter, like I said above, in the sense they shape the usage patterns and benefits and costs. But for permanence (or something approaching it), decades-long sustained support and resources are needed.
Some options include: a government program, a governmental funding stream, or some kind endowment. All can ensure a stream of resources into the future, with various tradeoffs. Are there better alternatives? (What exists now at the US federal level? / What combination of organizations might make an endowment happen?)
Volunteers are nice supplements to institutional support, but cannot be expected to be the backbone.
What is the Library of Congress doing in this area? The National Archives? Presidential libraries? Those old ’boring’ agencies and institutions tend to have a good number of folks that work towards better ways. It may be slow, but when the shift happens, it isn’t subject to the whims of capital markets or herd-following investors.
I just want to add that this wouldn't preclude conferences and journals either - these can continue to exist under this model, but their research output gets added to the central link library and the torrent added to P2P. Attendees to conferences already pay fees - these can remain, which keeps conferences economically viable - and many journals charge too, and can keep the peer-review up so when a paper does hit the P2P solution it's tagged as coming from a particular journal and therefore is worthy of trust. Papers <- Journals <- P2P/library.
E.g. if I were Emperor and could tear it all down and start again, we'd have either some kind of peer-to-peer network that maintained the paper bodies, and a centralised, institution-funded library of links (like SCOPUS/WoK/Google Scholar/ResearchGate but singular and funded by institution subscription) that is a central go-to for finding papers.
Then the links from that link library go to the P2P solution. For P2P, along the lines of Napster/TPB - torrents essentially, with nodes hosted by volunteers, universities etc.
We could potentially host copies of our own papers instead - I do, and be damned to the copyright etc - but as a sibling comment suggests, this is going to be unreliable and not sustainable in the long-term as sites die etc.
In terms of centralised tools, Google are doing a good job with Scholar but issues I've found are an absence of many older papers (pre-60s is a nightmare to find) and of course Google being Google, they're apt to set light to it all on a whim. They aren't reliable long-term custodians.