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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

#151

Post by geysersam »

parpfish wrote: post #77
tc4v wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's a very difficult problem. Am open forum offers a platform to troll and misinformation. You could pretend that the community will be able to filter this out but I seriously doubt this project is equipt to fight against bots/fake accounts better than huge companies like twitter and facebook.

Agreed. Journals have a hard time getting quality reviews from known scientists working in the field. Opening it up to randoms will be a nightmare. Remember all that hype around LK-99 room temp superconduction a few months back? The substantive scientific discussion would absolutely be drown out by curious laymen and/or grifters

That can be fixed. Just optionally filter the comments to only include sufficiently "reputable" sources (potentially people with status in the community or people you follow explicitly).

And to be fair, few scientific news get even remotely near the attention that superconductivity announcement got.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#152

Post by geysersam »

tc4v wrote: post #28
geysersam wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you feel that? I think it seems excellent. Comments will be scrutinized and sorted by the community. People can choose if they want to participate in the discussion under their own names or not. I don't know how this page organizes moderation, but I imagine there will be some kind of moderation like on most online discussion forums.

But it's a very difficult problem. Am open forum offers a platform to troll and misinformation. You could pretend that the community will be able to filter this out but I seriously doubt this project is equipt to fight against bots/fake accounts better than huge companies like twitter and facebook.

Stack overflow and wikipedia fights bots pretty well despite neither being backed by huge rich organizations.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#153

Post by generationP »

gwern wrote: post #138
impendia wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I think development on the TeX-to-HTML compiler has slowed down at some point, and it's far from perfect yet. Some of the issues are probably HTML5 limitations, unlikely to be fixed any time soon (unless one wants formulas to become graphics).

But there is another problem: It takes too long to load on mobile and doesn't reflow. I thought mobile was one of the reasons people wanted HTML in the first place!

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#154

Post by westurner »

michaelmior wrote: post #115
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that the paper would have be changed regardless, including the full email address is a relatively easy solution. ORCID is probably easier than requiring public keys and a lot of journals already require them.

W3D Decentralized Identifiers are designed for this use case.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#155

Post by celdon25 »

parpfish wrote: post #76
noobermin wrote: post #10

This seems like a horrible idea. I know we need an alternative to peer review but an online comment section feels like something worse than that.

The whole thing gives my anxiety. Writing a paper and dealing with the inane requests from three reviewers was already frustrating and stressful. Now you open up a never ending review process of random people making demands (“unless you do X follow up analysis, this is worthless”). also you need to be able to say a paper/project is done and let yourself move on. If your job turns into “respond to feedback on every pa…

That sounds like a good thing if your goal is to advance mankind’s knowledge and not just your career. No one is forcing anyone to respond to the comments. Also, it’s not clear whether your “demands” example would even pass the moderation guidelines there.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#156

Post by amadeuspagel »

generationP wrote: post #153
gwern wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I think development on the TeX-to-HTML compiler has slowed down at some point, and it's far from perfect yet. Some of the issues are probably HTML5 limitations, unlikely to be fixed any time soon (unless one wants formulas to become graphics). But there is another problem: It takes too long to load on mobile and doesn't reflow. I thought mobile was one of the reasons people wanted HTML in the first place!

In PDFs on arXiv, syntax highlighted codeblocks are graphics.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#157

Post by parpfish »

celdon25 wrote: post #155
parpfish wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing gives my anxiety. Writing a paper and dealing with the inane requests from three reviewers was already frustrating and stressful. Now you open up a never ending review process of random people making demands (“unless you do X follow up analysis, this is worthless”). also you need to be able to say a paper/project is done and let yourself move on. If your job turns into “respond to feedback on every pa…

That sounds like a good thing if your goal is to advance mankind’s knowledge and not just your career. No one is forcing anyone to respond to the comments. Also, it’s not clear whether your “demands” example would even pass the moderation guidelines there.

If people can’t make a career doing science, science doesn’t get done.

It’s one thing to optimize an abstract pursuit of knowledge, but you also gotta remember that you need this to be a job people are willing/able to do.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#158

Post by llmfan »

stevage wrote: post #61
llmfan wrote: post #8

hnews tries to say one positive thing challenge impossible i always love any idea for curating high iq internet community

Yours was the first negative comment I saw...?

That was the intention behind my comment! No need to thank me tho.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#159

Post by fileyfood500 »

tuxguy wrote: post #68

awesome honking idea ! please add "spaces" for biorxiv and medrxiv too !

It would be amazing if bioRxiv and medRxiv were included! I was curious how bioRxiv compared in usage/size to arXiv, and dug through the stats on each site. Both sites report paper download stats, and arXiv is about 12x larger (~50+ million downloads/month vs 4 million downloads/month for bioRxiv).

Interestingly, the sites have grown at a similar rate. Going back to 2020, arXiv had 25+ million downloads/month and bioRxiv had ~2.1 million.

[1] https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_downloads [2] https://api.biorxiv.org/reports/usage

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#160

Post by fileyfood500 »

fileyfood500 wrote: post #159
tuxguy wrote: post #68

awesome honking idea ! please add "spaces" for biorxiv and medrxiv too !

It would be amazing if bioRxiv and medRxiv were included! I was curious how bioRxiv compared in usage/size to arXiv, and dug through the stats on each site. Both sites report paper download stats, and arXiv is about 12x larger (~50+ million downloads/month vs 4 million downloads/month for bioRxiv). Interestingly, the sites have grown at a similar rate. Going back to 2020, arXiv had 25+ million downloads/month and bio…

Adding submissions stats:

1. arXiv, ~21k/month

2. bioRxiv, ~5k/month

3. medRxiv, ~1.3k/month

It would be interesting to see usage of other _xiv's and other pre-print publishers!

[1] https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions [2] https://api.biorxiv.org/reports/content_summary [3] https://api.medrxiv.org/reports/content_summary

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