The Internet is here to stay. Besides its many advantages two major drawbacks are daily visible: (i) abuse of anonymity and (ii) lack of quality control of presented information. These two issues are related: if  an onymous (pun intended) person with an impeccable reputation endorses an article on the web, chances are high that the paper is indeed of quality.

If the number of clients, customers, or members of not-for-profit or commercial enterprises runs in the thousands, the executives of these organizations would like to bind their clients. Issuing trading stamps is a strategy that is already older than a century. Another line of approach, more suitable for our times,  is to build a virtual community, forum or network. Newspapers, scientific journals, and universities have created their interactive web sites. Software companies do it. These communities will only blossom if the group of customers is not too much of a mixed bag and if the customers get something valuable in return when joining. A possible benefit for joining is the facilitation of communication with other members or with the officials of the organization.

Social media per se, like MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn work differently. Anybody can join and there is no a priori connection between the members. The software of these portals is designed such that members can build their own (virtual) social network from the inside.

All these community networks have as problem the anonymity, or better – pseudonymity – of its members. Crackpots, sick minds and criminals can join and perform their asocial activities. The threat, even if only potential, of these malafide participants make these networks unreliable.  Only LinkedIn is pretty trustworthy.

Scientific communities, two bad examples: Scientific American and the Chronicle
It seems that the only two commercial criteria for the success of a forum or community are its number of pageviews and its number of reader reactions. If your sole goal is to optimize your platform for generating income from Google Ads this measure is exactly what you need. But if your mission is more elevated and you have a reputation to protect other criteria should be used. A highly-reputable journal as the Chronicle of Higher Education has a successful forum – measured by the just mentioned commercial standards. However 99% of the reactions in the Chronicle forums, if not 99.9%, are under pseudonym. The forum masters do their utmost best to protect this hypocrisy. In my opinion these discussions among nameless people are worthless, unless you consider facilitation of public venting of the feelings of anonymous people a good deed. But would you be interested in the views of the Chronicle users “thisisme” and “untenured”.  The same journal would never allow these utterings in their paper version. And indeed the paper version is highly influential and their forum is trash.

Some years ago the forum site of Scientific American was flooded with reactions, because some crackpot had announced there that the laboratories of the European research organization CERN would explode if the Higgs boson would be found. Court cases followed. All very interesting sociology and psychology, but bogus natural science.

Numerous virtual scientific communities
Each and every publisher of scientific journals, commercial and non-commercial, has embarked on these virtual social communities. My favorite learned society, the American Physical Society, has sent me an invitation to join theirs. I am just one mouse click away from airing my full, pre-filled, profile with a list of my papers and much more. The journal Nature, with all its clones,  is also progressing along these lines.

The idea behind this development  is that much of the communication between scientists will in the future go through one of these communities. More scientists will feel the necessity to comment on a paper and will not tolerate any longer a three-month delay caused by a cautious reviewer.  The leading virtual scientific community will get more authors, get more readers, will get higher impact factors, etc. At least that is the expectation. The aim of any publishing house is clearly to become that leader. And hoping that Google will never get interested.

Unreliable communities
As long as there is no confirmation of the identity of their members the virtual communities will remain undependable. There will always be people joining these social media under false names and affiliations,  existent or not, and by doing so ruin the system.

I think it is scaring to open up scientific communication channels for anybody who is interested. Discussing science with a world of N.N.’s may seem good for the world but is bad for science. Should we allow unfiltered public comments from people that have never submitted a paper or have never acted as a reviewer? Might not ever have studied any natural science. How can we keep these people out as contributors? Not as readers of course. I think in the future only those virtual communities will survive that can prove the identity of their participants. This conclusion not only pertains to virtual scientific community but to any virtual community that wants to be reliable, twitter included.

To put it stronger: the first community network that will act on a base of members with confirmed identities will win the battle of virtual scientific communities.In the remainder I will come up with a suggestion about how to build such a secure virtual scientific community. The solution is simple.

Identity known of anonymous referees and of authors
Why has there never been an identification problem with classic peer review? The scientific journals seems to be sure of the identity of their reviewers and of their authors. And indeed there is not much to gain by an idiot to fake somebody’s ID, by stealing his snail mail correspondence, and writing a review using the stolen identity. In addition there is a number of explicit and implicit checks on the identity of authors and reviewers. Comparing author database entries with reviewer entries is one of them.

These classic identity checks will become less and less reliable for science publishers. Regular mail is phased out and more and more reader reactions and opinions will have to be published unfiltered and without peer review. Given the time pressure forum moderation will help only partially.

If you transfer money to me I trust you
The key to the solution is that organizations that have paying members can trust the identity of these members. The organizations that know the street address and an active bank account number of their members are sitting on a gold mine. Only a few fanatics will go through the trouble of paying a few hundred dollars yearly fee. With as additional threat for them that their address is not safe any more and could be revealed in case of illegal action or other wrongdoing. The organization could even require the knowledge of the street address of the member on entering membership. For instance because they have to send him a monthly glossy or because they have to be able send a reminder to the member to pay his yearly duties.

Learned societies know the address and an active bank account number of any member
Professional scientists are member of a professional society. Although in majority the institutes are of American origin, like the American Acoustical Society and the Optical Society of America,  they operate as global professional organizations. These societies know the street address of their members and they know an valid bank account number,  because by definition members pay their dues.

No fanatic Einstein debunker will become a member of the American Physical Society and pay yearly a few hundred dollars. No defender of “free energy for everybody” movement will become a member of the IEEE. And in the very unlikely case that he would become a member his identity is known.

So learned societies have members with confirmed identities, including their email addresses. That is all what is needed.

Silver members
The structure of the social networks of the professional networks should change. Community-members are classified in at least two categories. I will take three categories  as an example: bronze members, silver members and gold members. The members of the learned society will be given the possibility to opt in the social network as silver member, with everywhere where their name shows up –  as author, moderator, reviewer, commenter, or editor –  a silver star is shown next to it. Other people that want to join will become initially a bronze member (with a bronze star next to their name.)

To get many silver members a number of benefits should be offered. A reduction of the membership dues to begin with. Only silver members are allowed to rate scientific articles on the site. Only silver members can submit opinions etc. Silver members have access to a larger part of the site. Many more possibilities can be envisaged to support the silver members.

Upgrading
If a bronze member wants his community-membership upgraded he can do one of the following two things: (i) become a member of the learned society, or apply for an upgrade. In this upgrade procedure a number of silver members have to vouch for the identity of the bronze member. This could be done all through the Internet, but conformations are sent by regular mail to the silver members and the applicant. A reasonable number of needed silver members for an upgrade could be something like five from at least two different countries. The identity of the supporters will be visible for all silver member.

As a result the number of silver members will quickly grow, as a real diffusion process.

Gold and platinum members
Silver members can be upgraded to gold. For instance because they are fellow of the society. Or because they have written a large number of positively rated comments. Again many modalities can be thought of.

Gold mine
My suggestion is a gold mine if implemented quickly. All the software is available and even available as open source. Related organization (like American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union) can team up.

Social network that have not implemented this identity confirmation process will soon be considered second rate. A journal like Nature with no connection to a society and a company like Elsevier will both bite the dust. The fate of the journal Science will depend on the participation of the American teachers.

Value
If the network with confirmed identities takes off it will also soon become influential in media, with policy makers and as a factor in forming of public opinion. Polls and surveys among silver members have a real meaning.

Not for every organization
Of course many organizations have paying members, but for my idea to work the customers have to be a homogeneous group with shared interests. If a community is directly related to the work of professionals it could succeed. But tourist organizations, hotel-booking organizations, public-transport operators to mention a few,  cannot profit from this suggestion.

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