At https://42papers.com/ we want to get more folks reading papers our focus in on surfacing papers from arXiv that our community would appreciate so we focus on trending papers, improving readability, etc
The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#12I don't usually read long articles on my phone but the design of that page on my Pixel 6 was just so perfect! I hope this becomes the norm!
This is precisely their point. Reading the usual Arxiv-PDF on a phone is a pain, even if you just want to glance at some key parts of the text. Their version is much, much better. It's self-promotion by the Authorea team on the platform they are competing with (ArXiv), but they have a point. Arxiv needs to go HTML.
But the article link is arXiv's own (admittedly experimental) HTML5 viewer!! And your parent comment is praising it.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#13This seems... ambitious. I think ArXiv (edit: Actually this is not by ArXiv, but some other group ) is drastically over-estimating the desire to submit papers to their service. They are popular because they host the documents you were going to produce, in the format that the journals expect. The production of a Arxiv appropriate document is a side effect of the actual job, which is writing a paper to submit to a jour…
The article is not at all by the arXiv people. This is just a paper submitted to arXiv (about arXiv). The confusion is understandable, because the link is to arXiv's experimental HTML5 viewer, not the usual format (which would be: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020).
The authors are from Authorea.com, a for-profit that wants to replace arXiv.
Edit: Aside from that, fully agree with you. Good luck to them.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#14I'm still wandering about a service that would be to arXiv what Github became to Sourceforge. Order of magnitude improvement of collaboration and interconnection between published materials.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#15They lost me at suggesting that a future ArXiv should be
> Web-native and web-first
Absolutely not. It should be "physical paper first". Any long-term archiving cannot rely on electrical devices for viewing archived material. Electrical grids fail. Technology changes. Even if ArXiv is not a print archive, the material in it must be, first and foremost, printable in a consistent manner, and with the authors targeting the physical printed form. Of course, one would need to actually print ArXiv items to physically archive them, but still.
Now, of course archiving data is useful and important; and large amounts of data are less appropriate for print archiving. But that should always be secondary to the archiving on knowledge.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#16> The arXiv of the future is format-neutral and separates format from content.
Didn't this use to be Latex's tagline? Separate format from content. Which the authors of the article don't find separate enough.
How does the proper separation of format from content even work? Don't you need to markup your content in order for it to become formatted?
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#17The authors first list some issues with arXiv. Next, they describe how to fix those issues. Then the good news arrives: this improved arXiv already exists. It's called Authorea.com. All three authors are Authorea.com employees. They do disclose it as their affiliation. Still, this is essentially an ad written in LaTeX. They correctly point out a few of the limitations of arXiv (mostly: static LaTeX and PDFs). But I p…
Thanks. It was not clear to me whether this is a white paper by the arXiv people, or talk by external folks.
I now see that Wikipedia says this.
Authorea was launched in February 2013 by co-founders Alberto Pepe and Nathan Jenkins and scientific adviser Matteo Cantiello, who met while working at CERN. They recognized common difficulties in the scholarly writing and publishing process. To address these problems, Pepe and Jenkins developed an online, web-based editor to support real-time collaborative writing, and sharing and execution of research data and code. Jenkins finished the first prototype site build in less than three weeks.
Bootstrapping for almost two years, Pepe and Jenkins grew Authorea by reaching out to friends and colleagues, speaking at events and conferences, and partnering with early adopter institutions.
In September 2014, Authorea announced the successful closure of a $610K round of seed funding with the New York Angels and ff Venture Capital groups. In January 2016, Authorea closed a $1.6M round of funding led by Lux Capital and including the Knight Foundation and Bloomberg Beta. It later acquired the VC-backed company The Winnower.
In 2018 Authorea was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Atypon (part of Wiley).
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#18This seems... ambitious. I think ArXiv (edit: Actually this is not by ArXiv, but some other group ) is drastically over-estimating the desire to submit papers to their service. They are popular because they host the documents you were going to produce, in the format that the journals expect. The production of a Arxiv appropriate document is a side effect of the actual job, which is writing a paper to submit to a jour…
The article is not at all by the arXiv people. This is just a paper submitted to arXiv (about arXiv). The confusion is understandable, because the link is to arXiv's experimental HTML5 viewer, not the usual format (which would be: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020 ). The authors are from Authorea.com, a for-profit that wants to replace arXiv. Edit: Aside from that, fully agree with you. Good luck to them.
Ah, thanks for the correction, that really changes things!
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#19A small proposal: why not a PopcornTime of papers? Witch means a distributed network (no matter if BitTorrent, ZeroNet, GNUNet, I2P or something else) to publish? That's the best freedom guarantee and just the mere number of nodes with a paper is a good metric about it's popularity, to avoid oblivion each uni/researcher can easily store and serve their own papers forever: files are small, so download is quick, not much resources are needed.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#20> The arXiv of the future is format-neutral and separates format from content. Didn't this use to be Latex's tagline? Separate format from content. Which the authors of the article don't find separate enough. How does the proper separation of format from content even work? Don't you need to markup your content in order for it to become formatted?
It’s fairly well separated from the perspective of being able to write content fairly agnostic of a presentation template, and then swap in the required publication template in the end (with a few cosmetic tweaks very occasionally).
But LaTeX is largely an extension of TeX, and these markup languages seem not very amenable to re-implementing parsing / automated processing (given numerous attempts that have resulted in stalemates).