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ArXiv's Next Chapter

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81–90 of 107 posts

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#81

Post by kaizenite »

tancop wrote: post #16
piokoch wrote: post #6

That worries me a bit. ArXiv was and is great and so useful to humanity, giving access to otherwise closed knowledge, hold by publishers cartel, that I would not like to see it is turning into a "non-profit" of OpenAI kind...

openai had billionaire "donors" who understood the company was going to operate as a PBC with a positive return for them instead of a true nonprofit. the heel turn to unlimited for profit was only possible because of their unique structure and the fact they were already selling commercial products. arxiv is not selling anything so theres no financial incentive to take over.

Yeah yeah yeah, are you buying arXiv at IPO?

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#82

Post by pbronez »

Thought-provoking closing paragraph from the linked Cornel Chronicle article about the transition:

“It’s now difficult to prepare for the world three months from now if the median LLM-produced computer science paper is better than that produced by the median grad student.”

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/06/digital-research-re...

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#83

Post by bonoboTP »

m-hodges wrote: post #24

I 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.

Have you personally reviewed for big conferences or submitted and received reviews? It's a very noisy process that does toss out the lowest effort clueless stuff, but doesn't discriminate all that well between "meh" and "interesting", junior reviewers (the bulk) want proof of blood, sweat and tears. They want novel model modules and algo tweaks and complain about novelty that it's just A plus B, missing the point... They surely don't catch wrong results or incorrect claims because the catastrophic problems that invalidate papers are often in the implementation, not the nice math equations that motivate it.

In other words, Arxiv is what you use when you want to inform yourself on new research, conferences are for furthering your career by getting closer to your PhD graduation, expand your CV etc. And then to network and mingle with researchers in person and try to get hired.

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#84

Post by bonoboTP »

m-hodges wrote: post #30
montebicyclelo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some blog posts are worth citing.

Of course some blog posts are worth citing. Then cite them as blog posts. My point is that a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status. An unreviewed argument starts to look like established research merely because it adopts the visual grammar of a paper.

The classic paper format is just ergonomically what many of us are good at handling effectively as readers. For example in ML typically they all have an abstract, a teaser figure with a caption, Fig. 2 with a method overview/architecture (boxes and arrows). An intro starting with the motivation and the problem with prior work, their key idea, their experimental evidence, then a dense restatement of the contributions as bullet points. Then related work overview, then the method description in detail, then the experiments, dataset descriptions, protocols, metrics, then the results and their interpretations, then the conclusion, i.e. what they conclude from the results.

Its fairly rigid and newcomers often complain that it's too repetitive but if you read such papers for years, you learn to very quickly navigate such a paper that adheres to these conventions and you quickly see if it's something you care about right now or not. Blog posts don't have the same formal structure and it makes the quick skimming and assessment much harder.

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#85

Post by dooglius »

m-hodges wrote: post #30
montebicyclelo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some blog posts are worth citing.

Of course some blog posts are worth citing. Then cite them as blog posts. My point is that a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status. An unreviewed argument starts to look like established research merely because it adopts the visual grammar of a paper.

If you judge things based on their formatting, that's on you

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#86

Post by KludgeShySir »

modeless wrote: post #29
m-hodges wrote: post #24

I 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.

https://www.alphaxiv.org/ is a nice place to browse, search for, and read ArXiv papers which have optional AI summaries and chat. If you like one paper, you can get a list of similar papers.

To view a specific paper, just take original link and change "arxiv" --> "alphaxiv". For example: https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#87

Post by pfdietz »

gspr wrote: post #40
TomasBM wrote: post #9

ArXiv 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

Overlay journals can also have a short editorial description of the paper, basically an executive summary of what it says and why it's interesting or noteworthy.

Examples:

https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/

https://www.advancesincombinatorics.com/

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#88

Post by tim-kt »

yawnxyz wrote: post #76
tim-kt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they also keep the papers as a pre-edited, free version of the peer reviewed equivalent

This reminded me of the fact that one colleague of mine even updates the arXiv version if any errors are spotted and says himself that this makes the arXiv version better than the journal version.

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#89

Post by maleldil »

emil-lp wrote: post #18
xdertz wrote: post #10

Earlier 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

ACL conference papers usually cap the main body at 8 pages, with unlimited appendices. KDD has a hard limit of 9 pages plus 3 for references and appendices.

Re: ArXiv's Next Chapter

#90

Post by gordian-mind »

khurs wrote: post #41
nok22kon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly, the only reason Mozilla exists today is as a legal shield against an anti-browser monopoly suit against Google. that's the product they sell, and Google is paying hundreds of millions per year for this valuable service

I thought google pay Mozilla so they don't set the default search engine to something else (they same way Google pay Apple for Safari) and so Google continues to dominate and makes money of ads.

That cannot be the reason: Firefox has a market share of 3%...
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