Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ezramagazine.cornell.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 141 posts

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

#81

Post by slacka »

naftaliharris wrote: post #9

This article misses one of the biggest value-adds of arXiv, at least in my field (Statistics): since almost everyone posts to arXiv, you can almost always find a free version of a published and potentially pay-walled paper. In the past, publishing in a peer-reviewed journal would (1) improve the paper through peer review, (2) signal the quality of the paper based on the prestige of the journal, and (3) distribute the…

> you can almost always find a free version of a published and potentially pay-walled paper.

On personal research, I've used it for exactly this, but since what I've seen was only preprints, I've often wondered about the final version. It looks like I'm not alone.[1] Do many or any of the arXiv papers get updates with the improvements that come from peer reviews? Is there a need for arXiv for finals or do publishers demand exclusives on finals?

[1] http://mathoverflow.net/questions/41141/should-i-not-cite-an...

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

#82

Post by IanCal »

kensai wrote: post #74
IanCal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think peer-reviewing is slow then it's probably because you don't get the PEER part of the reviewing process. I understand the process fully. It doesn't make it fast, nor does it make it a necessary cost to pay. Delaying access to content for several years does not solve a problem. A not-insignificant time was spent bouncing between people to sort out who was paying for the costs, then there is also a delay…

"I understand the process fully. It doesn't make it fast, nor does it make it a necessary cost to pay. Delaying access to content for several years does not solve a problem. A not-insignificant time was spent bouncing between people to sort out who was paying for the costs, then there is also a delay between acceptance and publication. This now averages just a month in pubmed, but papers can bounce around this point…

> You don't understand a thing and that was the proof of it, at least for me. The process of peers evaluating a paper takes a lot of time because it cannot be automated and is serious, especially for the better journals. Of course bouncing people (referees) is part of the process, to find the better and/or most available one.

The time of the actual reviewing does not alter either of the two other time sinks that I posted. The median post acceptance to publication time for the journal of clinical neuroscience is over three months, and other journals head over a year. [0]

> Of course you can cut corners and pre-print,

Preprints are not an alternative to publication. They are something you can do before publication. Hence the name.

> Pre-printing might be the case in fields like CS and its subfields where verification is a very quick thing, but totally unsuitable in fields such as biology or medicine

There is absolutely nothing unsuitable about releasing your work early in any field. There is a problem in assuming un-vetted work is vetted, but preprints don't make any claim to have been vetted.

0 http://www.nature.com/news/long-wait-for-publication-plagues...

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

#83

Post by ctchocula »

ASipos wrote: post #77
CJefferson wrote: post #54

Can I just make a general plea? You should upload your paper to arXiv. When you do, please upload your source (tex, or word I imagine), as well as a PDF. For the blind, PDF is the worst possible format, and tex and word are the best formats. Don't hide, or lose, the blind-accessible version of your paper.

For the record, if you upload the TEX, arXiv autogenerates the PDF.

The problem I face is that my papers is in multiple tex files in several folders connected to a main.tex using \includes. Is there a convenient option that will take care of this issue?

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

#84

Post by CJefferson »

robin-berjon wrote: post #80
CJefferson wrote: post #54

Can I just make a general plea? You should upload your paper to arXiv. When you do, please upload your source (tex, or word I imagine), as well as a PDF. For the blind, PDF is the worst possible format, and tex and word are the best formats. Don't hide, or lose, the blind-accessible version of your paper.

I know that Word has decent accessibility built in (because Microsoft actually cares about this) but I'm surprised that you're getting mileage out of TeX which is a very visual format. Do you basically screen-read the source? Or is there a non-visual output for it that works?

Yes, you do have to learn Tex to read it, but I don't know of any other format any blind mathematician uses. It is common to teach maths with latex -- while it isn't perfect by any means, it is better than any alternative.

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

#85

Post by CJefferson »

agumonkey wrote: post #70
CJefferson wrote: post #54

Can I just make a general plea? You should upload your paper to arXiv. When you do, please upload your source (tex, or word I imagine), as well as a PDF. For the blind, PDF is the worst possible format, and tex and word are the best formats. Don't hide, or lose, the blind-accessible version of your paper.

PDF readers manage to parse text back somehow effectively, maybe not on formula / formatting heavy PDFs. Anyway good call, accessibility is not only for mainstream websites. I'm sure the blind dude that aced math classes in college would agree.

Formulas and many tables do very badly.

Would be nice if latex embedded the source of equations into pdfs. Wonder how hard that would be to add?

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

#86

Post by agumonkey »

CJefferson wrote: post #85
agumonkey wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF readers manage to parse text back somehow effectively, maybe not on formula / formatting heavy PDFs. Anyway good call, accessibility is not only for mainstream websites. I'm sure the blind dude that aced math classes in college would agree.

Formulas and many tables do very badly. Would be nice if latex embedded the source of equations into pdfs. Wonder how hard that would be to add?

Embedding anything in PDF doesn't seem hard (considering what a few security talks said).

How large are latex files ? probably not much a few 100KBs. It's easy to add a compressed stream in a PDF. It's a great idea.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

beevai142 wrote: post #69
divbit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> withing a short time frame of each other are usually understood to be cases of parallel invention I see what you are saying, but I don't think it's that cut and dry, otherwise I could just take someone else's work from yesterday (or whatever a short time frame is), and re-solve it (easily -since now the tricky parts have been revealed) and post it today - tada, I parallel invented it!

Typically the work in a paper, if substantial, is done over a long time, so even if the main destination ends up being same, it's unlikely the route and sidestops are the same. So often you can wriggle a little bit and expand the paper sideways, so that it is still publishable work even if the other work is given priority. It's actually not that rare to have similar papers appear in arXiv one or two weeks later after…

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

baby wrote: post #68
lorenzhs wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure whether you're serious, but on any article's page there a "Download" section with a link to the PDF (labelled "PDF").

Not always.

Can you link three examples.

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

#89

Post by ckdarby »

Is there any reason why a project like this wouldn't be open sourced?

Follow up question, how does a site like this have a $500k annual budget? I was napkin calculating the costs of running this and couldn't get anywhere close to $500k without having extensive staff salaries.

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

#90

Post by cooper12 »

ckdarby wrote: post #89

Is there any reason why a project like this wouldn't be open sourced? Follow up question, how does a site like this have a $500k annual budget? I was napkin calculating the costs of running this and couldn't get anywhere close to $500k without having extensive staff salaries.

Looking at it from a Cornell point-of-view, the most innocuous reason I can think of is that they want a canonical library of papers that others can mirror rather than researchers having to search each individual university's arXiv. If they let others fork and set up their own servers it could lead to interesting modifications/applications but it would no longer be in their control and might make the preprint locations fragmented. (and the other servers might not have the same moderating standards)

The other more greedy explanation is always money. Of course open source isn't antithetical to profit, but as mentioned before you do lose control and maybe Cornell doesn't want competition. Even if the project was started with the best of intentions, they still need to make it self-sufficient and maybe even profitable so they probably decided it's in their best interest. Of course this is all just me speculating.

Post reply on HN