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ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

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Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#191

Post by StableAlkyne »

hijodelsol wrote: post #61
frankling_ wrote: post #40

The recent announcement to reject review articles and position papers already smelled like a shift towards a more "opinionated" stance, and this move smells worse. The vacuum that arXiv originally filled was one of a glorified PDF hosting service with just enough of a reputation to allow some preprints to be cited in a formally published paper, and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos. It ha…

I came here to say something similar. As someone who works in a field that applies machine learning but is not purely focused on it, I interact with people who think that arXiv is the only relevant platform and that they don't need to submit their work to any journal, as well as people who still think that preprints don't count at all and that data isn't published until it's printed in an academic journal. It can fee…

I've noticed it's field dependent. Some fields don't really feel much need to publish in a real journal.

Others (at least in chemistry) will accept it, but it raises concern if a paper is only available as a preprint.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#192

Post by jltsiren »

segmondy wrote: post #165
mort96 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salaries in the US are so bonkers. Everywhere else outside of the US, $300,000 is an outlandish high salary. To call it "mid to high" is insane.

Everyone outside the US doesn't deal with USD. Your comment is bonkers. Read up on purchasing power. All locations are not equal.

The traditional definition of high income starts at 2x the median. Looking the US as a whole, anything above $125k should be considered high income. But it doesn't feel like that, because median wages are unusually low in the US relative to mean wages. Upper middle class salaries, on the other hand, have grown very high, and they have distorted people's perceptions. Even now, we are debating whether almost 5x the median should be considered high income.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#193

Post by matt-noonan »

Cordiali wrote: post #86
davnicwil wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an opinion, and you feeling no particular way about it is equally valid. But I did justify and maybe to reword slightly, surely if one of the main drivers is opening up research, the brand name should be something that's less obscure and more accessible / understandable as to what it is on first sight? Maybe arXiv evoking the word 'archive' with an ancient Greek twist does that for some, but it's clearly a bit c…

I've never even connected the 'X' to the Greek letter chi. I just kinda accepted it as one of many groovy web 2.0 misspellings in search of a domain and trademark.

This is particularly funny because arXiv doesn't just predate Web 2.0, it nearly predates the public web entirely (only missing it by about two weeks)

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#194

Post by ryukoposting »

mort96 wrote: post #82
swiftcoder wrote: post #65

> raised concerns about the proposed $300,000 salary for arXiv’s new CEO, saying it seemed high Is a mid-to-high engineering salary outlandish for a CEO of what is likely to be a fairly major non-profit? Even non-profits have to be somewhat competitive when it comes to salary, and the ideal candidate is likely someone who would be balancing this against a tenured position at a major university

Salaries in the US are so bonkers. Everywhere else outside of the US, $300,000 is an outlandish high salary. To call it "mid to high" is insane.

Silicon Valley is the only place in the United States where $300K is even close to the "middle" of anything.

I just moved to SV a few months ago from the Midwest (and not a particularly cheap part of it). Telling my coworkers who aren't from the US what a house costs in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one who moved from a foreign country.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#195

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

swiftcoder wrote: post #65

> raised concerns about the proposed $300,000 salary for arXiv’s new CEO, saying it seemed high Is a mid-to-high engineering salary outlandish for a CEO of what is likely to be a fairly major non-profit? Even non-profits have to be somewhat competitive when it comes to salary, and the ideal candidate is likely someone who would be balancing this against a tenured position at a major university

Considering the value and prominence of arxiv to the world, this seems low to me. Although more importantly the rest of the staff needs to be well paid too, and if that's the ceiling its a bit concerning. It's crazy to me that people thought this was too high.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#196

Post by j2kun »

tokai wrote: post #184
whiplash451 wrote: post #174

I'm not sure why we're so focused on filtering what gets into arxiv (which is an uphill battle and DOA at this point) vs fixing the indexing , i.e. the page rank of academia. Google "sorted out" a messy web with pagerank. Academic papers link to each others. What prevents us from building a ranking from there? I'm conscious I might be over-simplifying things, but curious to see what I am missing.

Page rank was inspired by bibliometrics and evaluation of science publications. It's messed up now because of the rankings. Further fiddling with ranking will not fix the problem.

+1, PageRank was taken from academia. They even cited it in their original work. Funny how the origins of these things get forgotten.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#198

Post by supern0va »

justin66 wrote: post #177
swiftcoder wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the states, it’s more a distortion caused by the big tech centres. A software engineer in Ohio doesn’t command that kind of salary, but in San Francisco or Seattle that’ll buy you a moderately-senior engineer. And while academic salaries are generally not great, tenured professors at big universities tend to make a fair bit (plus a lot more vacation time and perks than is normal in the US)

> A software engineer in Ohio doesn’t command that kind of salary, but in San Francisco or Seattle that’ll buy you a moderately-senior engineer. On the other hand, a CEO of a well-known nonprofit might command that kind of salary in Ohio. People often underestimate how much the leaders of nonprofits pay themselves.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is entirely some sort of widespread bad behavior. Many non-profit boards conduct research on salaries and essentially size their organization and pay something akin to a market rate for the given size and scope.

However, even a small percentage of bad actors finding a way to inflate their salaries will, as a side effect, inflate salaries across the board because it influences the process that sets the salaries for the honest organizations.

It's a fun problem.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#199

Post by linhns »

bjourne wrote: post #124
magnio wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have their own: https://hal.science/ It is actually quite common to come across HAL in subfields of mathematics in my experience.

HAL is decidedly second-tier. Given the option, everyone would pick arXiv over HAL. Hence, HAL hosts lots of stuff that didn't (even) make it to arXiv => lots of subpar dredge.

I agree that dredge is a huge problem with HAL, but it's getting better. While arXiv is still stuck with a unfriendly UI.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#200

Post by lifeisstillgood »

I am sure it’s a dumb idea but why is there a problem for say the National Science Foundation or something to run a website that replicates ArXiv - if you are from an accredited university or whatever you can publish papers, fulfilling the “pdf store” function.

Then getting peer reviewed is a harder process but one can see some form of credit on the site coming from doing a decent reviewers job.

I suspect I am missing a lot of nuance …

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