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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

#21

Post by whatshisface »

sgift wrote: post #13
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.

> 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)

Think of it in terms of the speed of the field relative to the size of the paper - you aren't going to see no-graphene to industrial-graphene in a month, but you might see Johnson's 8% graphene be replaced by Smith's 8.01% graphene.

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

#22

Post by ajross »

divbit wrote: post #4

ArXiv is incredibly useful for research, but I think people also use it for a sort of "I posted it to arXiv first, therefore I solved it first" kind of thing, which imo can be misleading at times, if not everyone follows that. Also there is the eprint.iacr.org which seems to do the same thing, except for cryptography (or is it cryptology?), so I'm not sure if every important preprint in that topic gets to arXiv.

> I think people also use it for a sort of "I posted it to arXiv first, therefore I solved it first" kind of thing, which imo can be misleading at times

True, but I don't see that fights over precedence are unique to ArXiv either, or even made worse by it, no? I mean, at least now there is an unambiguous date-stamped public place to cite in this kind of fight. And those fights provide a built-in incentive to put stuff up there, which is good for all of us.

Basically: who cares about spitballs as long as the papers end up on ArXiv? Seems like a cost worth paying to me.

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

#23

Post by javajosh »

pepon wrote: post #20

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 p…

Requiring error-free latex is almost certainly a reasonable proxy for real curation effort.

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

#25

Post by pepon »

javajosh wrote: post #23
pepon wrote: post #20

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 p…

Requiring error-free latex is almost certainly a reasonable proxy for real curation effort.

Nah, I mean that it is a pain to upload error-free files. Due to dependencies with libraries and other reasons, a file that compiles in your computer often fails to compile in the arxiv.

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

#26

Post by dagenleg »

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.

Look, you are free to abstain from using pre-printed articles for your research if you do have doubts. Why start a crusade though?

ArXiv is working very well for a lot of scientists in Machine Learning, since must results can be doublechecked by simply running the code. I won't disregard a proved approach that I've myself seen working just because it hasn't been published yet.

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

#27

Post by lkbm »

JD557 wrote: post #10
PaulHoule wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Are you being literal about that or is that just a figure of speech? Could you please provide a source for those claims, if true?

I assume he's alluding to Ioannidis's 2005 paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"[0] and/or the replication crisis[1] in general.

[0] http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...

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

#30

Post by ci5er »

kensai wrote: post #11
PaulHoule wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ans…

It doesn't seem that anyone is saying that we need to get rid of the (admittedly valuable and proven) peer-review model of publishing in journals. Or that this is uniformly better for all use-cases, esp. those that peer-review excels at.

It's merely a supplement to peer-reviewed journals that has some nice characteristics, for some use-cases, which has been beneficial, to some researchers, in some fields.

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