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Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

scientificamerican.com

21–30 of 91 posts

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#21
post #19

The two sites I start my day with: hacker news and arxiv.

Do you read the /new submissions for particular topics? HN is a nice tidy list of top things, is there an equivalent for ArXiv?

You can use things like arxivsorter and benty-fields for this. You give them a list of papers you've published, or authors you are interested in and then get recommendations. The recommendations can be up and down voted to improve future recommendations.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#23
post #15

The two sites I start my day with: hacker news and arxiv.

Why have you never submitted an article you've found on Arxiv to HN? Are you not finding anything interesting there? (Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=henrydark ... I guess you could use a different account?)

I do a similar thing, but the papers I'm interested in are usually a bit too niche for a general audience. That's one of the things I don't like about academic papers, particularly in my field (astro), we don't tailor our abstracts and introductions to a wider audience.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#24
The arxiv is a treasure, and such preprint servers not only streamline the academic debate but are also a necessary first step towards a future without for-profit academic publishers.

The arxiv moderators are like human spam filters. And as anyone who dealt with email should know, spam filters are essential for a platform to remain useful. I think the article puts undue emphasis on the few edge cases that invariably arise with any such filtering system.

And being a moderator is a thankless job indeed. The efforts of a moderator are largely focused on the absolute worst papers, and the job is therefore very different from being a referee or editor of a reasonable academic journal. So personally I would also focus elsewhere any efforts at increasing diversity in academic institutions.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#25

From 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:…

I guess it just stops arxiv from turning into vixra.org

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#26

I 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.

Much of the money for startups comes ultimately from pension funds. They have a fiduciary duty to make sure the money is invested in something that is expected to make a return.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#27

I 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…

> Academics want to publish where there is prestige

Important to note that this is not some innate "want"; their careers depend on it. It's a means to an ends, the ends being being able to keep practicing science.

(Of course prestige-by-proxy will play a role as well, but it's not what's keeping the system in place.)

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#28
I'm in no way involved in academic research, and I don't now how it works in detail, but a question that popped into my head these days was: is there a place where people can publish papers even without any association with anything? Like, if I manage to do proper research, even without any qualifications on paper, would it still be useful? Does this make any sense?

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#29
post #28

I'm in no way involved in academic research, and I don't now how it works in detail, but a question that popped into my head these days was: is there a place where people can publish papers even without any association with anything? Like, if I manage to do proper research, even without any qualifications on paper, would it still be useful? Does this make any sense?

You can submit your work to any conference that is double-blind and get accepted if your paper is good. You don't need to be affiliated to a university.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#30
post #28

I'm in no way involved in academic research, and I don't now how it works in detail, but a question that popped into my head these days was: is there a place where people can publish papers even without any association with anything? Like, if I manage to do proper research, even without any qualifications on paper, would it still be useful? Does this make any sense?

In principle, submission is viable at many venues. PNAS has a few mechanisms for having established authors endorse your submission, for example. The main challenge is going to be the appearance of credibility to get past the starting point, since many non-affiliated submissions tend to be unpublishable without serious rework, at least in lab-based disciplines.
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