Let’s Publish Everything

I am in sympathy with the author's goals but the major problem with publishing everything on arXiv like forums is that: (i) it becomes impossible to sort out the good stuff from the nonsense produced by cranks, and (ii) it unfairly advantages "high profile" groups.

Today, if I have a grad student interested in security who wants some ideas for things to work on, I could ask them to go look up papers in Oakland, CCS and NDSS over the last couple of years and see if anything catches their fancy. This works because there's a reasonable number of papers that I could reasonably expect a PhD student to look through. Asking them to look up all the stuff that ends up on arXiv or the IACR's ePrints is not reasonable. There's just too much stuff there and most of it is not worth looking at that.

So, you might say the endorsements will take care of this. CCS et al. could just endorse some limited subset of the IACR ePrints. But this leads to problem (ii) above. Right now, we have a bunch of high-profile researchers (who are mostly at places like MIT and Stanford) who just put up stuff on arXiv without any peer review and they start picking-up citations right away because of their "elite" status. Some of this is deserved, because these people have done good work. But some of this is also just a publication cartel where everybody cites their friends' work and make it impossible for others to break into a field.

The larger point is that in a scenario where there are so many papers that nobody could possibly look at all of them will lead to a few groups accumulating all the citations and all the awards. This will especially be unfair to researchers in the developing world -- people at places like Bilikent, Tsinghua, and the IITs -- where researchers don't have the PR muscle power to highlight unpublished stuff.

Great insight, thanks! It sounds like AI could play a part here in order to achieve the required efficiency, e.g. sorting out the right papers for you.

I believe that there is a misunderstanding regarding the role of academic publishing. Before the Internet era, the only way to make your work known to other scientists was to publish it in a journal—prestigious if possible. Journals were a medium to spread scientific information and make it available.

Nowadays the situation is very much different. For example, there are preprint repositories such as arXiv where researchers can publish papers with very little oversight[1]. The journals don't serve the role of making information available anymore. Their main role is to act as a filter for scientific information, and the reputation of a journal signals whether it's a high-pass or a low-pass filter. Researchers want to publish in prestigious journals since it signals that their work is high quality, and it gives greater exposure to their work—prestigious journals have a broader reader base than unknown journals.

This considered, the author got a point. In experimental domains of science such as Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Psychology (and sometimes even Math! [2]), reproducibility is of paramount importance and publishing negative results helps both researchers save time by not doing repeated work and avoid statistical bias in meta studies.

In fact, what the author of this article implicitly looks for already exists![3] But they usually fail to gain traction, and this for a precise reason: writing and publishing a paper takes a great amount of time. Publishing a paper in favor of the null hypothesis usually does not bring much recognition, and the time could instead be used to research or write the next paper.

What can be done then? A solution could be to create a platform where scientific results can be made available without the whole publishing overload. No literature review, no verbose explanations, only "what we did" and "what we got". And if possible, in a machine-readable format. Any fellow HNers?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv#Controversy

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0749

[3] http://www.jasnh.com/

Its more that NAS members can publish some articles basically for free, so co-authoring with them is a good way to get in easier.

That being said, NAS members I know do not want to erode their reputation by publishing junk.

Interesting. This seems to correlate almost exactly with discovery in music streaming too. Given the torrent of new music available, how do you discover the new music that you like?

At the moment, AI is doing a pretty bad job of this - my Spotify Discover Weekly is an interesting listen, but I know it's not the best selection of new music out there suited to my tastes (to be fair, it's not really trying to be that, though). My "recommended" list on Netflix bores me. I get why they're recommending them, but it's all things that I've seen and rejected from My List, rather than things that I would find genuinely new and interesting.

I think this is the next big problem to solve, for everyone. The combination of Discoverability (how do I get my music/paper/novel/art/film discovered by the audience of people who will like it?) and Search (how do I find new music/papers/novels/art/film that suit my tastes/research subject?).