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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

#131

Post by atoav »

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…

I can't answer for everybody, but my (German) university is prohibited from doing so by law. We are state employees and as such our university needs a comtract with the people runnimg services that process our (or our students) data.

Obviously our university isn't gonna make a 10k€/month contract just because some prof wants their mail forwarded to gmail. Especially not if they are not working here anymore.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#132

Post by gigatexal »

cgshep wrote: post #102

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.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I've no skin in the game (not an academic and a math idiot but I've a hole in my heart for Aaron Swartz and what he stood for) but I love that there are professors like yourself that believe in the free sharing of knowledge.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#133

Post by BeetleB »

chipdart wrote: post #112
cgshep wrote: post #102

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.

> (...) 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 esta…

> Your comment doesn't read like one from anyone with any relationship with academia.

Your comment reads likewise.

He didn't say he publishes them exclusively on Arxiv. It's quite common for professors to post it there as well as submit to journals. Many (most?) journals allow for it - they don't insist the ones in arxiv be taken down - as long as they're posting preprints and not the final (copyrighted) version.

As an academic, you should also know that practices vary widely with discipline. As an example:

> dependent on them publishing on a small set of non-open peer-reviewed journals.

IIRC, NIH grants require publishing in open peer-reviewed journals.

Also, lots of disciplines are not heavily reliant on funding. In both universities I attended, the bulk of math professors did not even apply for grants! It's not required to get tenure (unlike engineering/physics). Also often true in some economics departments.

As an aside, your comment violates a number of HN guidelines.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#134

Post by DoctorOetker »

parpfish wrote: post #120
cgshep wrote: post #102

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.

> Tenured prof here. 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”

helpful would be cheaper equipment and tools used in research, and unrestricted popular access to scientific literature

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#135

Post by ZeroSolstice »

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…

> The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN.

I disagree. There are numerous times where I have browsed the comments on a HN post where people haven't read the article and are just responding to the comment thread. The workflow for this seems a bit different in that a person would have already read a paper and wanted to read through existing discussions or respond to discussion. With that, having the search front and center would follow as the next steps for a person who read a paper and wanted to "search" for discussions related to that paper in particular.

HN is more an aimless browsing which is a bit different than researching a specific area or topic.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#136

Post by Y_Y »

creer wrote: post #123
Y_Y wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I infer that you interpreted this question as an attack, or at least some sort of criticism. None was meant, I really just wanted to know if the email adress as written in the document was deliberately invalid or not.

You were declaring the address to be "fake". Presumed facts not in evidence.

I wasn't declaring anything! It was a question, which is why it ended with a question mark. It's a totally standard construction in English, and would probably include a rising tone if spoken.

I cannot understand how what's written there could have been confidently construed as a statement.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#137

Post by fragmede »

Y_Y wrote: post #136
creer wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were declaring the address to be "fake". Presumed facts not in evidence.

I wasn't declaring anything! It was a question, which is why it ended with a question mark. It's a totally standard construction in English, and would probably include a rising tone if spoken. I cannot understand how what's written there could have been confidently construed as a statement.

because you used the word fake in an accusatory tone. that seems to not be what you intended, but that seems more on you to word it better than to expect all readers to interpret your words differently.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#138

Post by gwern »

impendia wrote: post #90
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…

> Use HTML rather then PDF. The PDF is the original paper, as it appears on arXiv, so using PDF is natural. In general academics prefer PDF to HTML. In part, this is just because our tooling produces PDFs, so this is easiest. But also, we tend to prefer that the formatting be semi-canonical, so that "the bottom of page 7" or "three lines after Theorem 1.2" are meaningful things to say and ask questions about. That sa…

I increasingly recommend against the Arxiv HTML version. I thought it had an acceptable start and they would fix the remaining problems and rapidly become on par with the PDF, but that seems to not be happening.

The HTML version is seriously buggy; and the worst part is, a lot of those bugs take the form of silently dropping or hiding content. It's bad enough when half the paper is gone, because at least you notice that quickly, but it'll also do things like silently drop sections or figures, and you won't realize that until you hit a reference like 'as discussed in Section 3.1' and you wonder how you missed that. I filed like 25 bugs on their HTML pages, concentrating on the really big issues (minor typographic & styling issues are too legion to try to report), and AFAIK, not a single one has been fixed in a year+. Whatever resources they're devoting to it, it's apparently totally inadequate to the task.

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