I have always liked arXiv's articles on information science and library science. I hope they continue publishing quality research.
ArXiv's Next Chapter
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Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter
#62I have always liked arXiv's articles on information science and library science. I hope they continue publishing quality research.
Any examples or greatest hits you would care to share?
Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter
#63I always struggle to figure out what role arXiv should play in my information diet. On the one hand I support Open Access research. On the other hand, peer review is vital, and a substantial quantity of “papers” on arXiv are just blog posts in a LaTeX trench coat.
Do people browse arxiv or monitor new posts like reddit or something? I only visit when I encounter a link to it or when I search for a specific paper.
Not all the time, but I certainly do to keep up with latest results. Usually, these days I go through SciRate, where the quantum computing community is very active in voting up good paper [1].
Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter
#64I always struggle to figure out what role arXiv should play in my information diet. On the one hand I support Open Access research. On the other hand, peer review is vital, and a substantial quantity of “papers” on arXiv are just blog posts in a LaTeX trench coat.
One growing role, especially in mathematics, is that of a host for "overlay journals": https://www.insmi.cnrs.fr/en/cnrsinfo/epijournaux-en-mathema... I really like the idea. In short: arXiv, HAL and similar sites host the papers without any peer review (short of perhaps stopping crank spam) or access control. They're freely available to anyone. Authors then submit arXiv IDs (or similar) to the reviewers of "overlay…
I’ve been arguing for this for a long time, glad to see this sort of thing start.
Papers “being in” a journal hasn’t made sense for a long time, but curation is valuable as is staking reputation on something.
People I was with called some of this “badges”, there is no reason why a paper cannot be reviewed by a set of people who say “this is new and innovative stuff in the field and highly important if true, but we’re not making claims about the stats” and a different set able to say “the stats here is spot on but we don’t know how relevant it is in biology” and another to say “we can rerun the code and get the same analysis results out, but we don’t know if the analysis is doing anything useful”. Right now we have journals making some combination of claims, and authors have to pick a single journal.
Once you view journals as a list of papers, the exclusivity seems weird. Once you see that journals are then a set of identifiers added to a paper, or rather statements about a paper, there’s lots of interesting ways you can imagine more useful things than current publishing.
Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter
#65ArXiv is a good complement to the modern peer review, IMO. As long as someone "vouches" for you, and you adhere to its minimal standards, you're able to post a paper. Other readers can decide whether the paper is worth their attention, and whether the presented ideas or results are valuable. It's also good that it doesn't gatekeep with the paywalls that you can pretty much only afford by affiliating yourself with a t…
You can even combine arXiv and peer review very neatly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48744030
I like this - thanks for sharing!
Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter
#66I always struggle to figure out what role arXiv should play in my information diet. On the one hand I support Open Access research. On the other hand, peer review is vital, and a substantial quantity of “papers” on arXiv are just blog posts in a LaTeX trench coat.
Unless you are in research I would not bother; you are trying to drink from a firehose. Let other people do the curating for you.
Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is also valuable for scientists as it is often a 'directors cut' version of the paper. Journal submissions are heavy edited and shortened to fit into the page limits.
I don't know which field you're talking about, but in general, math and cs journals do not have page limits. By the way, one of my favorite pastimes is to download the latex source for papers on arxiv and read all the commented-out stuff. % we should make sure this theorem is actually true
> I don't know which field you're talking about, but in general, math and cs journals do not have page limits.
A lot of physics journals do. Anything ending in "Letters" (e.g. Applied Physics Letters, Physical Review Letters".
Science has a word limit per article.
Nature doesn't have a hard limit, but if it exceeds 6-8 pages, it needs to be exceptional.
Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter
#68I always struggle to figure out what role arXiv should play in my information diet. On the one hand I support Open Access research. On the other hand, peer review is vital, and a substantial quantity of “papers” on arXiv are just blog posts in a LaTeX trench coat.
If you know the authors of your specific area of research, arXiv is a nice way to read their new papers when they are (mostly) done but the submission to a journal is not finished yet.
This. In my experience, you have to replace peer review with reputation for preprints. That's highly imperfect, and it tends to lead to dismissing of good but work by less well-known researchers as "not peer reviewed", while well-known researchers (or researchers at well-known institutions) basically get a fast track to citations.
Despite the imperfections, I found arXiv indispensable for my research. In particular, mathematics has a slow peer review cycle (it's hard to read and understand, and many referees require that they fully understand a paper to accept it, which imo is a little flawed, but that's the culture). I had several papers that were under review for more than a year (single journal, only one round of revisions), and arXiv was my only showcase. Both works ended up very highly cited, but publication delays would have been an even bigger problem if arXiv wasn't there.
Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter
#69Should charge AI for training on top of it or get them to donate. A small amount can fund them easily.
Papers submitted to arXiv under its most permissive license should always be free , as in beer, speech, freedom. For researchers that contribute to it, that is the intention for a reason. It is to serve public and corporate good without restriction. This isn't me siding with AI companies by the way; it's a slippery slope argument.
> It is to serve public and corporate good without restriction.
Sometimes those two are in conflict, such that it will not be possible to satisfy both simultaneously.
Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter
#70I'm always grateful to arXiv. It allows non-scientists like me to access high-quality papers anytime. Thank you, always
I am thankful for arXiv only made minor adjustments to its UI over the years, and I hope arXiv keep it that way.