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The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv

ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org

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Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv

#21

Post by wolverine876 »

> the PDF is not a format fit for sharing, discussing, and reading on the web. PDFs are (mostly) static, 2-dimensional and non-actionable objects. It is not a stretch to say that a PDF is merely a digital photograph of a piece of paper.

It is too far a stretch, murdering the poor subject:

PDFs are the best format available for long-term information, such as research papers. They have the advantages of digital data: Searchable, copy-able, transmittable, and data is extractable. They are also an open format, don't rely on a central service to be available, and they preserve presentation across platforms. They have metadata, and are annotatable and reviewable. And the PDF format is the best for long-term preservation, carefully designed to be readable in 50 years - partly because they preserve presentation across platforms - and that includes the metadata, annotations, and reviews.

PDFs are like paper in that they will look the same 50 years from now as they do today, unlike (almost?) any other digital format.

Yes, I wish they were a bit more dynamic in layout, and that the text was more cleanly extracted.

Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv

#22

Post by sdenton4 »

jimhefferon wrote: post #17
stncls wrote: post #10

The 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…

I don't really see how a for-profit preprint service is desirable, given the terrible track record of other for-profit entities in academic publishing. The extra features will be great until the gatekeeping kicks in after the first missed funding round...

Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv

#23

Post by PeterisP »

kkfx wrote: post #19

A 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 mu…

What problems does it solve for the authors? The features you describe above don't seem a problem in the current solutions; freedom and availability is a non-issue for authors, "to avoid oblivion each uni/researcher can easily store and serve their own papers forever" is a flaw not a feature (there are already far too many ways to do that, which only add extra burden to the authors if they want to "be everywhere" for the sake of availability), it doesn't seem that it would be easier than the current way; the resources/effort needed would be small but non-zero, so it sounds like just an extra annoyance, not something beneficial.

And if it solves some problems for someone else but not the authors, then how would a comprehensive majority of papers enter the system? Papers are even less interchangeable than movies; if you want to have a particular movie and it isn't available on PopcornTime, you might watch something else, for papers you just have to go elsewhere that actually does have everything.

Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv

#24

Post by tempnow987 »

"sharing research via PDF must inevitably come to an end."

Maybe instead of using the obsolete toolset arxiv provides, they could host their groundbreaking research on their own platform? The combination of ground breaking features and insightful commentary would draw users?

Actually, many of the negatives they list are positives in my book. The latex barrier screens out a ton of garbage in my view - I'm on some social science / word based research lists, and the quality of stuff is mind bogglingly bad.

Getting stuff it fit into a PDF (instead of the NY times new scrollable story stuff) makes grabbing or print off or even reading easy - less dynamic is good in my book.

Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv

#26

Post by mixedmath »

This is an advertisement for Authorea (which I'd never heard of). I extract two passages that stand out to me.

> What is the single most important factor that has prevented the arXiv to quickly innovate? We believe it is LaTeX. The same technological advancement that has allowed the arXiv to flourish, is also, incredibly, its most important shortcoming. Indeed, the reliance of the arXiv on LaTeX is the source of all the weaknesses listed below.

> The research products hosted by the arXiv are PDFs. A title, abstract, and author list are provided by the authors upon submission as metadata, which is posted alongside the PDF, and is rendered in HTML to aid article discoverability.

It's interesting to me that the authors ignore that it is possible to read the source tex for most papers on the arxiv. The arxiv prefers to be given tex and source files, and then to compile and serve the pdf --- when this is done, you can read the source. In this way the arxiv is a repository of both the plain text source of the document and a formatted output.

In some of my papers, I deliberately include comments or extra data in the source for others. I'm not alone here; I've used the code embedded in this paper [1], for example.

While I think there would be some advantages if the arxiv required all papers to be compilable tex source files, I understand that the arxiv also accepts other formats to not exclude potential writers who do not know tex. [The other formats are pdfs (e.g. converted from Word) or HTML with jpg/png/gif images (which I have never seen in practice)].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.07827

Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv

#29

Post by j-pb »

wolverine876 wrote: post #21

> the PDF is not a format fit for sharing, discussing, and reading on the web. PDFs are (mostly) static, 2-dimensional and non-actionable objects. It is not a stretch to say that a PDF is merely a digital photograph of a piece of paper. It is too far a stretch, murdering the poor subject: PDFs are the best format available for long-term information, such as research papers. They have the advantages of digital data: S…

None of those virtues hold in practice. I've worked both at public library digitization efforts and machine learning companies that did document ingestion and analytics. You always OCR the PDF visuals to get the text, because that's the only thing reliable about PDF. Everything else is often wrong, broken, or non-existent.

By separating the meaning from the visual representation there is no incentive to keep the invisible data workable.

PDF might as well be replaced with SVG, in terms of rendering consistency and metadata extraction capabilities. Because for a plain vector image format it's not that impressive.

Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv

#30

Post by mistrial9 »

enriquto wrote: post #6
chaxor wrote: post #4

One thing I would love to see from the arxiv sites is a publicly available download of an SQLite database . They have a bunch of PDFs, and latex source - but the real killer would be a database with just the text for each section, and then the ability to generate* the pdf, using various different styles. This would save an enormous amount of space, and make things far more tidy. I suppose the images could be stored i…

> This would save an enormous amount of space, and make things far more tidy. Why? The output pdf is typically smaller than the input that produces it. Using rendered pdfs seems simple and very natural, and at worst can use twice the total amount of space.

for the ability to modify (forge?) contents you need the sources
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