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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

#121

Post by dguest »

chipdart wrote: post #112
cgshep wrote: post #102

Tenured prof here. Every paper of mine goes on Arxiv with no exceptions, published under CC BY-NC-ND licenses. Some of us are working hard to overcome the system (e.g. look at the IACR's efforts). Unfortunately, academics are still hindered by institutional inertia; in fact, many prefer the status quo, usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers.

> (...) in fact, many prefer the status quo, usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers. Your comment doesn't read like one from anyone with any relationship with academia. If you had, you'd know that the issue is not a vacuous "prestige" but funding being dependent on hard metrics such as impact factor, and in some cases with metrics being collected exclusively from a set of esta…

I all fairness, I don't think the grandparent post disagrees with anything that is in the parent post here.

Yes, academia has tried to quantify prestige via impact factor and peer-reviewed journals. Yes, lots of people (even in Academia) feel that the system is being gamed, with by the publishing houses that own the journals being a common scapegoat.

The system isn't broken, but it also keeps its integrity through some dynamic tension: a bit of criticism is a good thing.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#122

Post by azhenley »

Maken wrote: post #67
azhenley wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never understood why we need emails in papers. Who sends emails to paper authors? How often do they respond? How fast do the email addresses go out of date? I lost access to my email address included in most my papers within 2 years of publication. I see little to no value to have it included in the paper.

I do email paper authors and I do respond to requests and inquiries about my own papers. Even if you don't work at the same institution any longer, most universities let you redirect your email for many years after you left. Also, I don't think we are yet at the point when human2human communication is not possible.

You don’t need emails in archival PDFs for human-to-human communication.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#123

Post by creer »

Y_Y wrote: post #63
chipdart wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you've put a fake email address on your papers? I think you're failing to understand the basics of the problem, and even the whole problem domain. Email addresses are not created/maintained for life. You can have an email address, them have your org change name and email provider switch, and not to mention that researchers leave research institutions and thus lose access to their accounts. You have multiple scen…

I infer that you interpreted this question as an attack, or at least some sort of criticism. None was meant, I really just wanted to know if the email adress as written in the document was deliberately invalid or not.

You were declaring the address to be "fake". Presumed facts not in evidence.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#124

Post by rehaanahmad »

w-m wrote: post #4

Hey alphaxiv, you won’t let me claim some of my preprints, because there’s no match with the email address. Which there can’t be, as we’re only listing a generic first.last@org addresses in the papers. Tried the claiming process twice, nothing happened. Not all papers are on Orcid, so that doesn’t help. I think it’ll be hard growing a discussion platform, if there’s barriers of entry like that to even populate your p…

Thanks for reaching out, I am one of the students working on this. We are adding google scholar support soon. If your paper isn't on Scholar or ORCID, you will need to submit a claim that our team reviews. There isn't really any other option, arXiv doesn't allow us to view the author's submission email automatically (although we are in the process of becoming an arXiv labs project soon).

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#125

Post by rehaanahmad »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #78

I wish for either: 1) Zoom buttons just for the paper - the article text is often tiny, and zooming in with the browser messes up the page layout and makes the page practically unusable. OR 2) A simple direct button to download the PDF directly. This would alleviate the zoom problem since I can view it in my local PDF reader with the best settings for me. Having to go to arxiv to download the PDF for every paper woul…

Zoom is in the works! We are adding this in the coming week!

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#126

Post by rehaanahmad »

cs702 wrote: post #66

How are the creators going to prevent gaming? I ask because every system I've ever come across for discussing and ranking content without human moderation is always, sooner or later, gamed.

We have a team of enthusiastic reviewers/moderators in a couple sub-categories. We plan on growing this team out as the site continues to grow. If you'd like to be a reviewer: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/11ve-4cL0axTDcqnHF66zX6greFV...

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#127

Post by rehaanahmad »

One of the co-creators of this site. A lot of great suggestions I'm reading so far, a lot of them are currently in the works (zooming in/out, infra issues for slow loading times on some papers, google scholar claiming papers).

For some more context, we are a group of 3 students with a background in AI research, and this site was initially built as an internal tool to discuss ai papers at Stanford. We've been dealing with a lot of growing pains/infra issues over the past month that we are in the process of hashing out. From there we would love to make a more concerted effort to share this in areas outside of AI. Happy to hear your thoughts here, or more formally via contact@alphaxiv.org.

I do want to highlight, our site has a team of reviewers/moderators and having folks from different subject areas is critical to making sure the site doesn't end up a cesspool, apply here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/11ve-4cL0axTDcqnHF66zX6greFV....

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#128

Post by rehaanahmad »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

Great idea, we'll look into making the home page the trending page soon.

Regarding HTMl, our original site actually only supported HTML (because it was easier to build an annotator for an HTML page). the issue is that a good ~25% of these papers don't render properly which pisses off a lot of academics. Academics spend a lot of time making their papers look nice for PDF, so when someone comes along and refactors their entire paper in HTML, not everyone is a fan.

That being said, I do think long term HTML makes a lot of sense for papers. It allows researchers to embed videos and other content (think, robotics papers!). At some point we do want to incorporate HTML papers back into the site (perhaps as a toggle).

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#129

Post by JadeNB »

chipdart wrote: post #112
cgshep wrote: post #102

Tenured prof here. Every paper of mine goes on Arxiv with no exceptions, published under CC BY-NC-ND licenses. Some of us are working hard to overcome the system (e.g. look at the IACR's efforts). Unfortunately, academics are still hindered by institutional inertia; in fact, many prefer the status quo, usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers.

> (...) in fact, many prefer the status quo, usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers. Your comment doesn't read like one from anyone with any relationship with academia. If you had, you'd know that the issue is not a vacuous "prestige" but funding being dependent on hard metrics such as impact factor, and in some cases with metrics being collected exclusively from a set of esta…

> And ArXiv is not one of them.

But putting your papers on the arXiv, as your parent said, doesn't mean you only put them on the arXiv. I put all my papers on the arXiv, but I also submit them for publication in journals that will help me make the case for funding and promotion.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#130

Post by levocardia »

karencarits wrote: post #64

There is also https://pubpeer.com/ I worry that fragmentation of this space might not be beneficial, so it would be nice if these services could collaborate in some way, perhaps using activitypub or something

Agreed, pubpeer is already a very widely used platform in health and biology research. The PubPeer chrome extension is a must-have, in my mind, as it alerts you when a paper you find (even linked on some other website) has comments or has been retracted.
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