I am an academic scientific researcher (and a trans-woman – just a quick shoutout for the sake of visibility), and I am wondering if a platform for free or low fee open-source peer reviewed scientific publications can be developed on the Cardano platform?
Facilitating the peer review process between scientists, a system to vote for or against interested scientists who wishes to contribute their time as an editors for different decentralized journals with tokenized research funding reward system for active contributors … and so on… To disrupt the increasingly corporatized for-profit publishers.
But one issue currently with research is the obsession with impact factors of journals… a chicken or egg problem for something like this to gain traction. Need wide adoption, before most scientists will become willing to publish on it. A free, autonomous, decentralized, tamper-proof, and secure blockchain system will certainly be an attractive factor, perhaps starting with supporting research in poorer developing countries, thus gaining/establishing adoption/reputation there first, before very gradually gaining traction by the scientific communities in developed countries, etc.
Or rather than “Impact Factors”, perhaps just let any research groups freely publish their work after having underwent an initial peer-review and editor screening process. The quality of that work can be assessed with a post-publication on-going peer-review that can carry on into the far future (e.g. previous work can be overturned). And all users can filter their search of these open-source publicly accessible articles base on their “quality”, “citation count”, and a computed overall dynamic “Impact Factor” base on a transparent equation that could be tweaked by community votes.
I have been musing about this idea for quite awhile now, being frustrated with how the journals are overran by the for-profit publication corporations. Perhaps, in the future, an ecosystem to enable a voting by the relevant scientific community (i.e. previous authors that have published in a given scientific category) + say 30% by the general public too, to provide funding (or top-up funding) to other research (with the minimum fees collected from journal subscription and publication on the platform) could also be gradually introduced.
So much more can be said… and so much possibilities. And I believe that Cardano is well positioned to serve as a platform for something like this to the academic community considering its strong ties with it. 
Just my 2cents worth of idea to suggest here.