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Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

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Re: Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

#11

Post by kensai »

PaulHoule wrote: post #8
kensai wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, however, we can argue here that a pre-print is not of the same quality as a published work. Not that published works cannot have errors (and be retracted), but at least they have passed a first-level scrutiny of an editorial board.

It is pretty controversial. The value of peer review has never really been demonstrated and despite peer review, the median scientific paper is wrong.

How do you want this value to be demonstrated? Peer-reviewing is exactly this: peers evaluating the methodology and results of your experiment or idea. If this is faulty, imagine how much more faultier is an attempt to pre-print without even passing that step, which mind you, is pretty important for major journals such as Nature or Science.

Peer-reviewing has a lot of weak points, but saying that pre-print is the answer to them all is plainly wrong.

Re: Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

#12

Post by kensai »

dagenleg wrote: post #7
kensai wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, however, we can argue here that a pre-print is not of the same quality as a published work. Not that published works cannot have errors (and be retracted), but at least they have passed a first-level scrutiny of an editorial board.

Yes, but passing through the editorial board takes time. In some fields research moves extremely fast and by the time papers is properly published it's already obsolete.

That's the price of scrutiny, man. Time. And these "extremely fast fields" are the same fields that need to backtrack and retract their claims. The loss of time, effort, and resources for other scientists if they use pre-printed claims and data from faulty publications can be really enormous and probably already wildly underestimated.

Re: Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

#13

Post by sgift »

dagenleg wrote: post #7
kensai wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, however, we can argue here that a pre-print is not of the same quality as a published work. Not that published works cannot have errors (and be retracted), but at least they have passed a first-level scrutiny of an editorial board.

Yes, but passing through the editorial board takes time. In some fields research moves extremely fast and by the time papers is properly published it's already obsolete.

> In some fields research moves extremely fast and by the time papers is properly published it's already obsolete.

Could you provide some examples for a layman? To me it always seems that science moves far slower than one could hope for (e.g.: Every 'breakthrough' in batteries/Graphene of the last ten years and still no products)

Re: Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

#14

Post by IanCal »

kensai wrote: post #12
dagenleg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but passing through the editorial board takes time. In some fields research moves extremely fast and by the time papers is properly published it's already obsolete.

That's the price of scrutiny, man. Time. And these "extremely fast fields" are the same fields that need to backtrack and retract their claims. The loss of time, effort, and resources for other scientists if they use pre-printed claims and data from faulty publications can be really enormous and probably already wildly underestimated.

The flow is significantly slower than is required for checking work. I'm fairly sure my wifes papers didn't really take nearly two years to review.

Machine learning is a field that's moving quickly and can also largely be checked quickly by other people in the field too. The problems that can't be checked easily are also those that won't be checked by the journals anyway (no journal I know of will retrain one of googles deep nets to see if they get the same result before publishing).

Re: Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

#15

Post by kitchi »

PaulHoule wrote: post #8
kensai wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, however, we can argue here that a pre-print is not of the same quality as a published work. Not that published works cannot have errors (and be retracted), but at least they have passed a first-level scrutiny of an editorial board.

It is pretty controversial. The value of peer review has never really been demonstrated and despite peer review, the median scientific paper is wrong.

> the median scientific paper is wrong

What does "wrong" mean in this context? Does it mean that most scientific papers will be shown to be inaccurate in the due course of time? That is bound to happen given the nature of scientific progress.

But peer review aims to assess the methodology and rigour of the papers being presented. I agree that it is often debatable whether this happens in reality, but that doesn't explain your statement I quoted above.

Re: Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

#16

Post by leegao »

kensai wrote: post #12
dagenleg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but passing through the editorial board takes time. In some fields research moves extremely fast and by the time papers is properly published it's already obsolete.

That's the price of scrutiny, man. Time. And these "extremely fast fields" are the same fields that need to backtrack and retract their claims. The loss of time, effort, and resources for other scientists if they use pre-printed claims and data from faulty publications can be really enormous and probably already wildly underestimated.

That's not necessarily true across all "fast fields". There's definitely selection pressure against fields sensitive to faulty experimentation to "move fast." Computer Science is one of the bigger subjects within Arxiv. Retraction rates within this discipline is extremely low and the field as a whole moves very rapidly. Having access to preprints makes it much more scalable for researchers to stay at the cutting edge.

Re: Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

#17

Post by [deleted] »

kensai wrote: post #12
dagenleg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but passing through the editorial board takes time. In some fields research moves extremely fast and by the time papers is properly published it's already obsolete.

That's the price of scrutiny, man. Time. And these "extremely fast fields" are the same fields that need to backtrack and retract their claims. The loss of time, effort, and resources for other scientists if they use pre-printed claims and data from faulty publications can be really enormous and probably already wildly underestimated.

[deleted]

Re: Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

#19

Post by kensai »

IanCal wrote: post #14
kensai wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the price of scrutiny, man. Time. And these "extremely fast fields" are the same fields that need to backtrack and retract their claims. The loss of time, effort, and resources for other scientists if they use pre-printed claims and data from faulty publications can be really enormous and probably already wildly underestimated.

The flow is significantly slower than is required for checking work. I'm fairly sure my wifes papers didn't really take nearly two years to review. Machine learning is a field that's moving quickly and can also largely be checked quickly by other people in the field too. The problems that can't be checked easily are also those that won't be checked by the journals anyway (no journal I know of will retrain one of goog…

If you think peer-reviewing is slow then it's probably because you don't get the PEER part of the reviewing process. The PEERS are simply colleagues who have their own lives, priorities, and research. They don't stop what they are doing to review your wife's papers.

And please, I see what's happening here: I have been portrayed as the "traditional journal apologist" although it's definitely what I wanted here. I simply wanted to express my doubts that pre-printing is the answer to it all.

Anyway, is there a study that shows how many pre-printed articles in ML have been retracted or refuted so far? Until this is done, and shown as small as in peer-reviewed journals, keep a small basket.

Re: Library-managed 'arXiv' spreads scientific advances rapidly and worldwide

#20

Post by pepon »

I hope it is replaced with something better soon. You cannot see access statistics concerning the papers you upload, and they provide this absurd reason for not doing it: https://arxiv.org/help/faq/statfaq (it seems they think arxiv users are idiots or something, so they have to take care of us). Also getting the uploaded latex files to be compiled without errors is a pain, and they don't let you to just upload the pdf (this has pros or cons, but I wish there was the freedom to choose... and I guess that 99.999% of the time people just download the pdf).
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