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ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

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Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#231

Post by tzs »

bonoboTP wrote: post #68
ph4rsikal wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My observation is that research, especially in AI has left universities, which are now focusing their research to a lesser degree on STEM. It appears research is now done by companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tencent, Alibaba, among many others.

Universities (outside a few) just have much weaker PR machines so you never hear what they do. Also their work is not user facing products so regular people, even tech power users won't see them.

I came across a good example of that a few years ago. Caltech had a page on their site listing Caltech startups.

There were quit a few off them--by number of starts per year per person Caltech was actually generating startups at a higher rate than Stanford. But almost none of those Caltech startups were doing anything that would bring them to the public's attention, or even to the average HN reader's attention.

For example one I remember was a company developing improved ion thrusters for spacecraft. Another was doing something to automate processing samples in medical labs.

Also almost none of them were the "undergraduates drop out to form a company" startup we often hear about, where the founders aren't actually using much that they actually learned at the school, with the school functioning more as a place that brought the founders together.

The Caltech startups were most often formed by professors and grad students, and sometimes undergraduates that were on their research team, and were formed to commercialize their research.

My guess is that this is how it is at a lot of universities.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#232

Post by MattDamonSpace »

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 us has an enormous per capita gdp for that large a country

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#234

Post by jalla »

mort96 wrote: post #114
0x3f wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh right, well it depends on CoL doesn't it? You can reframe European salaries as 'obscene' by world standards too. Both the US and Europe have totally broken and unaffordable housing markets, for example, but at least the Bay Area compensates with salary. I would say that relative to costs it's more that other salaries are obscenely low, if anything. People in Europe should be rioting, but unfortunately only the hom…

Does cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters? Food delivery drivers? Or do those jobs command a six-figure salary too? If they can live comfortably in the city on a five-figure salary, maybe the argument that "cost of living is so high in SF that you can't live without a $300,000/year salary" is just a little bit overblown? I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an ap…

I worked at Redwood Shores. On a walk across the 101, I discovered where the cleaning staff and food workers lived. In cars, under the bridge or parked in a quiet corner of the street next to industrial or commercial property.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#235

Post by abdullahkhalids »

godelski wrote: post #226
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, particularly in ML, with some decently cited papers never formally published and "preprints" being cited left and right. This has been a common practice in physics, especially the more theoretical branches, since the inception of arXiv. Senior researchers write a paper draft, and then send copies to some of their peers, get a…

And this is really how it should be. Honestly the only thing I want arxiv to do is become more like open review. Allow comments by peers and some better linking to data and project pages. It works for physics because physicists are very rigorous. So papers don't change very much. It also works for ML because everyone is moving very fast that it's closer to doing open research. Sloppier, but as long as the readers are…

I don't agree actually that is how it should or can work for everyone. Senior researchers produce good quality research, and they have a network of high quality peers built over decades. Both those are necessary for them to reach out and ask for feedback, and get genuine and high quality feedback.

Junior researchers don't have these typically. They also benefit more from anonymous feedback, which enables the reviewers to bluntly identify wrong or close to wrong results. So I think open journals should continue to exist. They fill an essential role in the scientific ecosystem.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#236

Post by lokar »

godelski wrote: post #226
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, particularly in ML, with some decently cited papers never formally published and "preprints" being cited left and right. This has been a common practice in physics, especially the more theoretical branches, since the inception of arXiv. Senior researchers write a paper draft, and then send copies to some of their peers, get a…

And this is really how it should be. Honestly the only thing I want arxiv to do is become more like open review. Allow comments by peers and some better linking to data and project pages. It works for physics because physicists are very rigorous. So papers don't change very much. It also works for ML because everyone is moving very fast that it's closer to doing open research. Sloppier, but as long as the readers are…

You could imagine separating the "publishing" part, which really should just be open with minimal anti-spam etc, from the "this was reviewed by a trusted group of people so you should give it more consideration" part. You could do the second without it being attached to the publishing.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#237

Post by Drupon »

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.

[flagged]

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#238

Post by [deleted] »

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #219
bonoboTP wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs? I'm sure they can be offloaded to cold storage because most of that slop won't be opened by anyone. Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. It needs minimal checks to remove overtly illegal content.

> Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs? No. Around half the cost is infrastructure. The other half of the cost is people. i.e. engineers to maintain infra and build mod tools for moderators to operate. > Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. This is just not true. Tons of people ask for arxiv to have moderation. Especially since covid, etc when antivaxxers and alt…

[deleted]

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#239

Post by AccessScan »

Going independent makes sense for arXiv. But the more interesting part is what it tells us about how we fund the stuff that actually keeps research moving. arXiv runs on about seven million dollars a year and handles hundreds of thousands of papers. That's roughly twenty bucks a paper. This is the backbone of how physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians share work. Traditional publishers charge thousands per article. The math is almost laughable. arXiv has never had an efficiency problem. The problem is that we've just accepted that something this important should survive on voluntary contributions and the occasional donation saving the day. Look at what happened with bioRxiv and medRxiv when they spun off into openRxiv. That only happened about a year ago. Nobody knows yet if it actually works long-term or if it just kicks the money problems down the road. But both platforms, totally separately, came to the same conclusion. We need to leave the university. That says something. Universities aren't built to fund outside infrastructure forever. Their budgets follow enrollment, grants, and endowment performance. That doesn't line up with the steady, predictable funding arXiv needs to keep the lights on. Ginsparg calling it a "Perils of Pauline" situation is probably the most honest thing anyone said about this. Everyone treats arXiv like it will always be there. But it's been one bad year away from serious trouble for most of its life. The real test for the nonprofit won't be the first few years. Cornell and Simons have that covered. It'll be five or ten years from now when the excitement fades and they're competing for donor money against whatever the next crisis in academic publishing turns out to be. The worry about AI-generated junk is actually where independence could help. A university-hosted arXiv could only spend so much on moderation tools. An independent org with a focused mission can make that a real budget priority. Whether they can keep up with the flood of low-quality submissions is a different question entirely.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#240

Post by ide0666 »

The endorsement system is a real barrier for independent researchers. I've been trying to get endorsed for cs.NE for weeks — the work is published on aiXiv with video results, but without an institutional email or personal connection to an existing author, you're stuck. Glad to see arXiv thinking about independence — hope they also rethink access for non-institutional researchers.
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