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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

#111

Post by apathy »

frozenport wrote: post #107
apathy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at the Cornell Theory Center in the late 90s, I didn't know about the arXiv, but I sure as hell knew about screen readers. One of the best FORTRAN programmers (numerical analysis/applied math research faculty I think) was blind as a bat. I learned a lot about not underestimating people there. It's a strange university but it always makes me happy to think that it (specifically Ginsparg, and to some degr…

The OpenAcess and self-publication has removed an important check on research papers. If nobody cared about your subject, or if a journal's peer review process resulted in boring articles, it would not be financially viable. I think advocates of sharing science should also understand that, at present, the majority of the content is asinine or incorrect. Removing checks and balances is not helping.

The majority of content in most journals is asinine or incorrect. About the only thing that can fix this is quicker turnaround (cf STAP, NgAgo, the godawful GWAS paper in Neuron recently, etc).

It's not at all clear to me that the checks or balances were helping beforehand. Hiring a shit ton of MBA types to administer research probably didn't help much either.

Also, out of curiosity, is this open access / fast review problem what led to machine learning falling into irrelevance?

Because we wouldn't want that to happen to other fields. Can you imagine if raw clinical trial data was out there, for example? (The Horror! Best keep these appallingly expensive results locked up!)

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

frozenport wrote: post #107
apathy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at the Cornell Theory Center in the late 90s, I didn't know about the arXiv, but I sure as hell knew about screen readers. One of the best FORTRAN programmers (numerical analysis/applied math research faculty I think) was blind as a bat. I learned a lot about not underestimating people there. It's a strange university but it always makes me happy to think that it (specifically Ginsparg, and to some degr…

The OpenAcess and self-publication has removed an important check on research papers. If nobody cared about your subject, or if a journal's peer review process resulted in boring articles, it would not be financially viable. I think advocates of sharing science should also understand that, at present, the majority of the content is asinine or incorrect. Removing checks and balances is not helping.

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

frozenport wrote: post #107
apathy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at the Cornell Theory Center in the late 90s, I didn't know about the arXiv, but I sure as hell knew about screen readers. One of the best FORTRAN programmers (numerical analysis/applied math research faculty I think) was blind as a bat. I learned a lot about not underestimating people there. It's a strange university but it always makes me happy to think that it (specifically Ginsparg, and to some degr…

The OpenAcess and self-publication has removed an important check on research papers. If nobody cared about your subject, or if a journal's peer review process resulted in boring articles, it would not be financially viable. I think advocates of sharing science should also understand that, at present, the majority of the content is asinine or incorrect. Removing checks and balances is not helping.

[deleted]

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

#114

Post by witty_username »

contravariant wrote: post #95
hackuser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the blind, PDF is the worst possible format I'm surprised. Nobody has created an accessibility solution for PDFs after all these years of ubiquity? What's the story?

Well, I don't know about PDF, but PostScript, which it's based on is basically just a programming language for drawing symbols in specific positions on a page. Depending on how it was written (or more likely, generated) this could be readable, or incredibly unreadable. As an example, in post script the following example from Wikipedia would simply show the text Hello World: %!PS /Courier % name the desired font 20 se…

Well, less can extract the text; so I don't see why that's an issue.

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

#115

Post by kensai »

IanCal wrote: post #82
kensai wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 po…

"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."

Hey, you started claiming two years, no it's three months. Three months is perfectly acceptable for quality peer-reviewing. For good papers from experience authors (who know what critic to expect) this waiting might even be lower. High-quality publishing demands this.

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

Yeah, but the pre-print paper is almost never retracted if it has been completely revamped for the final publication, after corrections through peer-reviewing.

This makes a disservice to science cause in the meantime many scientists might have used the wrong data/methods found in the pre-printed version. That's the price of speed publishing. In some fields (biology, medicine) that price is very high.

"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."

Here we go again. I never said it was unsuitable. I, myself, sometimes attempt to pre-print. I just try to explain to you that pre-prints are not the silver bullets you imagine for high-quality spreading of scientific advances.

Yes, they spread fast and with no control, but high-quality leaves much to be desired. That's why it is probably prudent to accept as readers pre-prints only from established scientists who are known for their work ethos (by past results) and they will most probably submit their work to peer-reviewed journals as well.

Last but not least, everyone should be cautious about what he or she reads on pre-prints, especially on "slow" fields.

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

#116

Post by xvilka »

ctchocula wrote: post #83
ASipos wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Setting up something like webui for storing those files for every paper, something like gitlab or gogs, could really help. It could add more transparency, ability to add some feedback in the issues, and so on.

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

#117

Post by Ar-Curunir »

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.

There's also http://eccc.hpi-web.de/reports/menu/ for complexity theory.

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

#118

Post by Ar-Curunir »

kensai wrote: post #5
IanCal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Significantly faster than sci-hub. Sci-hub is, afik, based on published work. This is preprints, so well in advance of that.

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.

Hmm actually in my experience the versions of papers uploaded to preprint servers are the final versions, including reviewers comments. This is in cryptography, but I think the same can be said for complexity theory.

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

#119

Post by Ar-Curunir »

baby wrote: post #32

I hate arXiv, I can never figure out where is the PDF, if there is a PDF... long live eprint.

ePrint indeed offers a much nicer interface. However, I wish they didn't discard prior versions when people revise papers.

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

#120

Post by vsl »

witty_username wrote: post #114
contravariant wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't know about PDF, but PostScript, which it's based on is basically just a programming language for drawing symbols in specific positions on a page. Depending on how it was written (or more likely, generated) this could be readable, or incredibly unreadable. As an example, in post script the following example from Wikipedia would simply show the text Hello World: %!PS /Courier % name the desired font 20 se…

Well, less can extract the text; so I don't see why that's an issue.

It’s only an issue with crap PDFs (it’s possible to omit text information or obfuscate it to the point you copy & paste garbage out of them; pdfTeX-created PDFs are of course fine).
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