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alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

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Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#51

Post by oefrha »

acka wrote: post #43
atoav wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect any institution to support all email addresses of their ex-employees ad infinitum? This would be a security nightmare for them. It is pretty normal for universities to have some sort of identity managmemt system that automatically provisions emails when you are employed there and deprovision them once you are gone.

Why not have a system where students and staff have actual email inboxes but alumni have their email forwarded? Most universities use a portal of some sort for easy access to personal information and preferences anyway, so it shouldn't be too difficult to limit access for alumni to only allow them to change a few personal details like name / address / phone number and the like, plus email forwarding settings. I think…

If I run a university IT system I certainly don’t want someone who possibly attended a program thirty years ago walking around with an apparent affiliation with my institution. I find my institutions’ policies of (IIRC) one year forwarding + permanent alumni email pretty reasonable.

Additionally, making people who want to cold email work a little to acquire the current email address is actually a good thing, especially if they want to talk about something years old. I’ve generally had a lot more pleasant and engaging correspondence with people who worked out my email (say from a side project I develop pseudonymously) than ones who directly lifted my email from my professional profiles. So, expiring emails in papers generally isn’t a real problem anyway, and it’s basically never a hurdle if your target is still in academic circles. It only becomes a problem in this specific context of automated authentication (based on something not intended for that purpose).

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#52

Post by riedel »

phreeza wrote: post #5
w-m wrote: post #4

Hey alphaxiv, you won’t let me claim some of my preprints, because there’s no match with the email address. Which there can’t be, as we’re only listing a generic first.last@org addresses in the papers. Tried the claiming process twice, nothing happened. Not all papers are on Orcid, so that doesn’t help. I think it’ll be hard growing a discussion platform, if there’s barriers of entry like that to even populate your p…

How would you propose making claiming possible without the risk of hijacking/misrepresentation?

The claiming was 'solved' and ORCID, which both basically do no checking at all. It's just a yes/no clicking for fuzzy matched author name lists. So I guess it is enough until there is a dispute. If you are important enough to be the target of trolls than you are in a league beyond most research platforms.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#53

Post by sestep »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

Tiny note: Stack Exchange also allows spaces in display names, and they make @ functionality work regardless: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/43020/297476

Agreed that it makes it more complicated though.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#54

Post by MereInterest »

epanchin wrote: post #46
MereInterest wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s an example. I have a firstname.lastname@gmail.com address, which was intended to be permanent. Google turned on two-factor authentication, despite not having a second form of authentication available. Instead, they required the recovery address for 2FA. The recovery address was another Gmail address, which I haven’t used since 2010, and which also had 2FA turned on using its recovery address. That was an SBCGl…

“I place the blame on Google because I didn’t update my recovery address to one that worked”

First, recovery addresses are for recovery when access has been lost. They are an alternate method of entry when the primary method of entry has been lost. They are NOT an extra method of validation to be used for the primary method of entry.

When Google switched from offering 2FA to requiring 2FA, it would have been acceptable for them to require a second form of authentication to be added on the next log-in. It is not acceptable for Google to pretend that they have a second form of authentication when they do not.

Second, up until the moment it was needed, I had access to my recovery address. Google locked me out of my primary address and my recovery address simultaneously.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#55

Post by qwertox »

chipdart wrote: post #26
qwertox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email addresses are not created/maintained for life Then don't pretend that it is an email address. I mean, it's true that email addresses are not guaranteed to be assigned for life, but putting a fake email address on a paper is misleading.

> Then don't pretend that it is an email address. I think you don't know what a email address is, and how they are used. > (...) but putting a fake email address(...) This nonsense of "fake email address" was only brought up as a baseless accusation. There is zero substance to it, and it's been used as a red herring in this discussion. Focus on the problem: do you expect any and all email addresses you publish somewh…

> [...] you won’t let me claim some of my preprints, because there’s no match with the email address. Which there can’t be, as we’re only listing a generic first.last@org addresses in the papers.

I understood it this way: org is not handing out first.last@org to the employee, but using an email format in order to clarify that "first last" is working at org and collaborated on the paper not in private, but as an employee.

He might have last.f@org gotten assigned as a valid email address from the org, but that one is not being used on the paper, while first.last@org is invalid.

> I think you don't know what a email address is, and how they are used.

You should know that this kind of comment should not be made on HN, see the guidelines [0] ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.").

> do you expect any and all email addresses you publish somewhere years ago to continue to work?

No. But that is irrelevant to this conversation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#56

Post by auggierose »

Sophira wrote: post #38
auggierose wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upload a new version of your paper on arxiv, this time with an email address that works.

Why should they need to? Their email address did work at the time of publication.

They don't have to. But then they cannot claim the paper.

It is a good idea in general to make sure that your papers contain up-to-date contact information. One way of doing this is to use an orc-id.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#57

Post by jessriedel »

fuglede_ wrote: post #7
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #3

I remember seeing this idea some years ago. I think it was called qrxiv.org or something like that, but can't find it anymore. I hope this one has better luck, getting the users in the fragmented space of preprints can be a challenge.

There's also https://scirate.com/ which occasionally has active discussions but, at least in my field, there's far from critical mass, and discussions only happen when someone kick starts and advertises a thread.

I believe the most active field is quantum information, which has enough activity such that paper get dozens of upvotes, but the conversation level is basically as you describe.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#58

Post by azhenley »

auggierose wrote: post #19
w-m wrote: post #4

Hey alphaxiv, you won’t let me claim some of my preprints, because there’s no match with the email address. Which there can’t be, as we’re only listing a generic first.last@org addresses in the papers. Tried the claiming process twice, nothing happened. Not all papers are on Orcid, so that doesn’t help. I think it’ll be hard growing a discussion platform, if there’s barriers of entry like that to even populate your p…

Upload a new version of your paper on arxiv, this time with an email address that works.

I’ve never understood why we need emails in papers.

Who sends emails to paper authors? How often do they respond? How fast do the email addresses go out of date? I lost access to my email address included in most my papers within 2 years of publication.

I see little to no value to have it included in the paper.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#59

Post by qwertox »

Sophira wrote: post #27
qwertox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email addresses are not created/maintained for life Then don't pretend that it is an email address. I mean, it's true that email addresses are not guaranteed to be assigned for life, but putting a fake email address on a paper is misleading.

Let's say that John Smith at XYZ Corp has authored a paper. The company obviously wants recognition and so they use their corporate email address "jsmith@xyz.com". John has since moved on and is earning more at ABC Corp instead. XYZ Corp has duly reclaimed John's old email address, and John cannot receive emails at said address any longer. This is the situation the OP is in. It was never a "fake email address". They…

Ok, so they used a template on the paper, namely "{first}.{last}@hhi.fraunhofer.de", while the email addresses, if the names are applied to the template, do in fact yield valid email addresses.

It sounded as if they were using "john.doe@hhi.fraunhofer.de" while in reality it was an invalid email address ("because there’s no match with the email address"), that he would have tried to claim co-authorship via his "real" address, which might be something like "j.doe2@hhi.fraunhofer.de" (but luckily is not).

It's all clear now. Thank you for your explanation.

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