No I have not checked my methodology against previous contests. I've only been involved in this one and my interest rapidly wanes from that point backward. But it is an open and straightforward methodology that can easily be tested against prior results.
Open Peer Review to Save the World by Philip Gibbs
13 days later
Philip,
Thanks again for starting viXra. It enabled me to archive some of my papers for reference in a book I recently published on Amazon. I also recently re-published a couple of papers on academia.edu. It is interesting that the viXra papers and academia.edu papers get a lot of downloads and NO ONE comments. Do you know who these people are?
The essay format solicits some feedback. Your essay received a lot of positive feedback and some pushback from people I thought might have been "the establishment" showing some of the bias you describe. Once the essay voting was finished the dialog on FQXi subsided quickly. This makes me think that the reason the essay format works is that everyone wants to politic for votes. I know that our mental plasticity declines with age and experience but are we so closed to anything new that dialog can't generate new interest and thought without a carrot attached? Blogs and videos on more popular subjects can "go viral" on u-tube and other social media but appear to be short lived and shallow (my bias).
The more I thought about the need for open peer review the more I realized how important it is. What if some of the past autocrats, dictators and politicians had really listened to and acted on the best ideas and solutions available? History and civilization would be quite different. We can excuse some past behavior on lack of information and knowledge but this is not a good excuse in our information age. Theoretically it allows everyone to act globally rather than sub-optimizing.
Anyway, good luck. I think your essay will bring some attention to the difficult subject.
Gene, Yes, it is very difficult to get people to comment on a paper. That is one of the good things about the FQXi contest. Even if they do it to draw attention to their own work in the contest it is still a good thing that it generates some discussion.
It is also one of the reasons why it is very hard to get new peer review systems to work. As I explained in the essay, people do peer review to impress the editors who are likely to be future employers. If you want to implement a new system you must not lose that incentive.
It is not that people are not interested in other people's work. They just tend to read it and take it in, but it is much harder to form a critique. Most papers are skimmed quickly for the main facts. If you want to review it you need to spend much more time and there are a lot of papers to read.
Another way people get some feedback is by giving talks at conferences, but any comments are hard-won. Open peer review would go a little way towards helping but people need to be realistic about the feedback they can expect. No response does not mean that they work is not being read or that it is not liked. You just have to keep adding to your work and make sure it is archived for future reference.