251–260 of 300 posts
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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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 reviewer…
I want reviews of my papers! But I want reviews by people who care. I don't want reviews by people who don't want to review. I don't want reviews by people who think it's their job to reject or find flaws in the work. I want reviews by people who care. I want reviews by people who want to make my work better. I want reviews by people who understand all works are flawed and we can't tackle every one in every paper (the problem isn't solved, so there's always more!).
So low bars. Forget the prestige, citation count, novelty, and all the bullshit and just focus on the actual work and that the act of publishing is about communicating. Publishing is the main difference between private and public labs. Private labs do fine research, without all the formal review. It's just that nobody learns about it. They don't give back to the community.
So my ideal system still has reviewers, journals, and conferences but I think we'd get along just fine without them. I believe that if we can't recognize that then we can't use these other tools to make things better.
They aren't fundamental tools needed to make the process work, they're tools that can make the process work better. But I'm not convinced they're doing a good job of that right now.
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The point of my comment was, in much earlier institutions of knowledge and excellence, the only transparent metric was whether or not they approved you.
That ossifies intellectual monocultures, though. (Or, heaven forbid, if someone has a financial conflict of interest in the private sphere...)
and indeed we’re already left with all of the things claimed - the worst of both worlds, really.
arXiv is great. It's just a problem that there's so much slop. What if arXiv offered a subscription service that people in different fields could use to just see a curated selection of the top papers in their field each month. Established researchers in each field could then review some of the preprints for putting into the curated monthly list. Oh, wait.
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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 e…
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 missin…
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…
What possible value does a journal like Nature, for example, bring to the table by claiming a paper for themselves and charging people for it, given the alternative?
I don't see any value there. Maintaining an exclusive clique by using artificial scarcity while coasting on the dregs of reputation remaining to a once prestigious institution is what a lot of these journals are doing.
The world has changed. There's no need for that sort of pay to play gatekeeping, and in fact, the model does tremendous damage to academic and intellectual integrity. It allows people to get away with fraud and it makes the institutions motivated to hide and cover it up so as to not damage their own reputations by admitting anything slipped by them.
If you contrast the damage done by journals, with regards to suppressed research, gatekept access, money taken from researchers and readers alike, against the value they might plausibly provide, the answer is clear.
They're not needed anymore. The AI era, since 2017, has thoroughly demonstrated that journals are materially incapable of keeping up, that they're unable to meaningfully contribute to the field, and that their curation or other involvement has no effective practical value. The same is true for other fields, but everyone involved wants to keep their piece of the grift going as long as possible.
We don't need them, anymore. I suspect we never did.
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Do research papers published on Elsevier's sort of media remain more prestigious? I read a dozen papers a month, typically on arxiv, never from paywalled journals. I find the quality on par. But maybe I'm missing something.
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The S3 API/UX/cost model is so seductively simple for static hosting though. I kind of think they deserve their ubiquity. Not on 90% of their products though.
It's great for some applications, like to serve up the QR codes for this system https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840 I could even make those cards tradeable like NFTs, use DynamoDB as the ledger, and not worry about the cost at all. On the other hand if you are talking about something bandwidth heavy forget about AWS. Video hosting with Cloudfront doesn't seem that difficult, even developing a YouTube clon…
I’m sorry what. This is supposed to persuade me?