111–120 of 190 posts
I am very non-eager to help any further platform grow that has not been built on-top of sth like atproto (the BlueSky protocol), to prevent silos and the monopolist landlords that come with those. Great idea though, would love to use sth like this, if it existed on a federalized protocol.
Tenured prof here. Every paper of mine goes on Arxiv with no exceptions, published under CC BY-NC-ND licenses. Some of us are working hard to overcome the system (e.g. look at the IACR's efforts). Unfortunately, academics are still hindered by institutional inertia; in fact, many prefer the status quo, usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers.
Your comment doesn't read like one from anyone with any relationship with academia. If you had, you'd know that the issue is not a vacuous "prestige" but funding being dependent on hard metrics such as impact factor, and in some cases with metrics being collected exclusively from a set of established peer-reviewed journals that must be whitelisted.
And ArXiv is not one of them.
This means that a big share of academia has their professional and future, as well as their institution's ability to raise funding, dependent on them publishing on a small set of non-open peer-reviewed journals.
Reading your post, you make it sound like anyone can just upload a random PDF to a random file server and call it a publication. That ain't it. If you fail to understand the problem, you certainly ain't the solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't seem like citations would be good for discovery, because there must be a significant latency between when a paper is released and when citations start coming in.
Probably it would be best to just get a site on the web and expose a bunch of different metrics so people can sort by whatever. Citations are probably not the best metric for discovery, but also this really just makes me wonder if papers are not the best thing for discovery. An academic produces ideas, not papers, those are just a side-effect. The path is something like: * make a idea * write short conference papers…
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…
> Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers But don't we want people's attention drawn to controversial/conversation generating papers? The whole point of the platform is to drive conversation
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you propose making claiming possible without the risk of hijacking/misrepresentation?
The only way I see this working is for paper authors to include their public keys in the paper; preferably as metadata and have them produce a signed message using their private key which allows them to claim the paper. While the grandparent is understandably disappointed with the current implementation, relying on emails was always doomed from the start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In general academics prefer PDF to HTML. In part, this is just because our tooling produces PDFs, so this is easiest. The tooling producing PDF by default absolutely makes the preference for PDF justifiable. However, tooling is driven by usage - if more papers come with rendered HTML (e.g. through Pandoc if necessary), and people start preferring to consume HTML, then tooling support for HTML will improve. > But al…
> Couldn't you replace references like "the bottom of page 7" with others like "two sentences after theorem 1.2" that are layout-independent? Yes, but I think such references are inherently harder to locate. Personally I try to just avoid making references to specific locations in the document and instead name anything that needs to be referenced (e.g. Figure 5, Theorem 3.2).
I wish for either: 1) Zoom buttons just for the paper - the article text is often tiny, and zooming in with the browser messes up the page layout and makes the page practically unusable. OR 2) A simple direct button to download the PDF directly. This would alleviate the zoom problem since I can view it in my local PDF reader with the best settings for me. Having to go to arxiv to download the PDF for every paper woul…
Edit: The above is applicable to arxiv itself, I got confused, the alphaxiv.org opens the PDF in a framed way with no option to download, indeed.
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…
Tenured prof here. Every paper of mine goes on Arxiv with no exceptions, published under CC BY-NC-ND licenses. Some of us are working hard to overcome the system (e.g. look at the IACR's efforts). Unfortunately, academics are still hindered by institutional inertia; in fact, many prefer the status quo, usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers.
Yeah, but every pre-tenure or postdoc is like “I can’t fight the system right now, I need to publish enough to still have a job two years from now”