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ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

news.cornell.edu

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Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

#2
arXiv is a great resource. At least in my field (Programming Languages, but I imagine it applies to most if not all of Computer Science) it seems like most papers are on arXiv.

I see no reason to not make papers free. Most things cost money because either they're material themselves, or cost money/material to produce which needs to be somehow recouped. But papers cost almost $0 to distribute and are created with grants which get funded by the results and discoveries themselves.

Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

#3
> migrate to the cloud

Oh great, looking forward to a captcha every time I download a paper.

(FWIW, arXiv is one place I trust not to make such stupid decisions, but migrating to a cloud often means the decisions are no longer made in-house...)

Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

#4

arXiv is a great resource. At least in my field (Programming Languages, but I imagine it applies to most if not all of Computer Science) it seems like most papers are on arXiv. I see no reason to not make papers free. Most things cost money because either they're material themselves, or cost money/material to produce which needs to be somehow recouped. But papers cost almost $0 to distribute and are created with gran…

My philosophy is that if people want to spend (waste) time on closed journals more power to them.

Potentially when fields were small and niche this aggregation of topics might be useful. Today in modern search and computerized tools, the question is: why do we need them?

There's nothing in academia that I feel is more of a racket than this scheme.

I feel that _everything_ should be published and that natural discussion of said topic will drive the importance.

Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

#5

> migrate to the cloud Oh great, looking forward to a captcha every time I download a paper. (FWIW, arXiv is one place I trust not to make such stupid decisions, but migrating to a cloud often means the decisions are no longer made in-house...)

I suspect this cloud move is more for security -- to keep others out -- than to improve the product. As you mention, many decisions will no longer belong to Cornell. This is indicative of larger geo-political trends.

Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

#6
> arXiv was founded in 1991 by then-Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D. ’81, prior to his return to Cornell in 2001.

I had no idea arXiv was that old. I honestly only heard of it and started using it less than 10 years ago.

Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

#7

arXiv is a great resource. At least in my field (Programming Languages, but I imagine it applies to most if not all of Computer Science) it seems like most papers are on arXiv. I see no reason to not make papers free. Most things cost money because either they're material themselves, or cost money/material to produce which needs to be somehow recouped. But papers cost almost $0 to distribute and are created with gran…

My philosophy is that if people want to spend (waste) time on closed journals more power to them. Potentially when fields were small and niche this aggregation of topics might be useful. Today in modern search and computerized tools, the question is: why do we need them? There's nothing in academia that I feel is more of a racket than this scheme. I feel that _everything_ should be published and that natural discussi…

Would/could you apply this same argument to books?

Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

#8

> migrate to the cloud Oh great, looking forward to a captcha every time I download a paper. (FWIW, arXiv is one place I trust not to make such stupid decisions, but migrating to a cloud often means the decisions are no longer made in-house...)

It's possible that they jump straight to the hybrid solution that many companies now make. Like migrating to the cloud could be just to have backups of papers in s3 with failures to download them initially then pass through to the s3 location seamlessly. It could also be trying to rewrite everything to run on lambda.

My point being that migrating to the cloud means different things to different companies/groups.

Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

#9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My philosophy is that if people want to spend (waste) time on closed journals more power to them. Potentially when fields were small and niche this aggregation of topics might be useful. Today in modern search and computerized tools, the question is: why do we need them? There's nothing in academia that I feel is more of a racket than this scheme. I feel that _everything_ should be published and that natural discussi…

Would/could you apply this same argument to books?

I feel this is already true of books, the question is will a publisher put it out... books cost money to produce and by comparision to hosting are massive investments.

Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

#10
Why is this eating up NSF money / taxpayer money?! Megacaps like Google and Facebook are reaping tons of value from arXiv, i.e. (1) easy access to non-industry peer attention through a respected pre-print publisher, (2) major incentive to their employees and key component to performance review cycle, ...

Google itself has out-published most universities in conferences like NeurIPS for the past few years. For Google alone to match the $10m would be a drop in the bucket-- a $10m grant would be an order of magnitude less than the compensation they're paying to their own employees who make heavy use of arXiv.

NSF funds are scarce, precious, and it's immensely hard for lawmakers to divert funding to NSF versus e.g. defense. One thing arXiv needs is high-quality bandwidth and Google / Facebook have tons of that. Taxpayers are already paying tons for Google's several anti-trust trials, no need waste NSF budget for something industry can very very easily solve.

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