Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
scientificamerican.com
Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
#2I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials which is chump change.
Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
#3I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials which is chump change.
I also don't understand how there can so much money to throw at startups and not one person to "adpot-a-highway" for a year.
Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
#4I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials which is chump change.
Arxiv is a indirect threat to publications. Publications lobby the government and also influence university grants and other bodies.
We still don't have a proper open /free tax filing too from the IRS or tax computed by IRS only for us to verify/confirm as in some of other countries, primarily because intuit (and others) lobbied to make sure the government would never develop one (encoded in law no less), so it is not that surprising that a community benefiting project that threatens some big business revenues has no government funding available.
Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
#5The two sites I start my day with: hacker news and arxiv.
Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
#6I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials which is chump change.
If you mean some government should fund arXiv, specifically, then I don't disagree but would guess the government's default position of "it exists without public money, and we think that's rather excellent".
If you're suggesting it as alternative for academic publishing in general, it would cost a lot more.
Arxiv isn't a "publication platform" in the sense that peer-reviewed journals are. The cost of hosting and distributing PDFs is close to zero, obviously. What does cost money is the copyediting and running the peer review process.
People think Elsevier are the worst people in the world (not entirely wrong) and taking in millions while exploiting the free labor of authors and reviewers. But it's relatively easy to quantify the value they do add: their financials are public and, last I checked, they have operating margins of about 30 %.
Let's say we could do without their marketing and billing departments and that gets us to a margin of 50 %. That's pretty good, but it isn't quite the rip-off people sometimes suggest it is. Replacing the commercial publishers with government-funded open-access journals would be a billion-dollar endeavor, not a few million for servers and a bit of software.
Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
#7I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials which is chump change.
Part of the challenge is the reputation issue. Academics want to publish where there is prestige, which means there has to be a perception of the venue as good. This typically either comes from reasonable gatekeeping and high-quality peers (e.g. arXiv) or pushing metrics (e.g. Nature Publishing Group journals). Generating an attractive journal is non-trivial and few people with the appropriate knowledge and expertise take the plunge would do so without some guarantee of profit.
Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
#8From the article:
> But moderators frequently intervene, delaying posting by days or weeks, reclassifying papers or even outright rejecting submissions.
Definitely not my experience. I haven't posted to arXiv in a while now, but I wasn't even aware a moderation queue exists -- none of my papers were delayed, reclassified, or other...
EDIT: I see the article provides a few examples, but then they also provide numbers: "At arXiv, roughly 6 percent of submissions receive a hold, and about 2 percent are rejected." -- 8% of heavy-handed moderation intervention wouldn't qualify as "frequently" IMHO.
Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
#9I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials which is chump change.
I also don't understand how there can so much money to throw at startups and not one person to "adpot-a-highway" for a year.
Because you cannot rely on the rich to fund common goods through voluntary donations. It is not a good idea and never will be. Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill.
Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
#10I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials which is chump change.
If you mean some government should fund arXiv, specifically, then I don't disagree but would guess the government's default position of "it exists without public money, and we think that's rather excellent". If you're suggesting it as alternative for academic publishing in general, it would cost a lot more. Arxiv isn't a "publication platform" in the sense that peer-reviewed journals are. The cost of hosting and dist…
Perhaps it's best for governments not to get involved in arxiv. They are heavily involved in most other aspects of academia, and the results haven't been universally pretty.