I came across the background report for the Open Access to Scientific and Technical Information Conference when I was trying to figure out how much I liked the concept behind the Faculty of 1000 site. There is also a video of the webcast that has the discussion of this report (and other presentations). It’s good background for something we should all be thinking about.
The Faculty of 1000 concept is an interesting one – a Google for biomedical research articles. Experts rank the articles and a keyword search nets a page of hits as with Google’s Page Rank. But the Page Rank algorithm is more like the Citation Index with a page’s rank increasing with the number of inbound links. The Faculty of 1000 algorithm is based on popularity with potential for associated Tyranny of the Majority problems. Can popularity ranking stifle dissenting thought? We will soon see, it appears.