ArXiv declares independence from Cornell • Hacker News Board

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#261

Post by aleph_minus_one » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 12:34 AM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #210

jballanc wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I exited academia for industry 15 years ago, and since then I haven't had nearly as much time to read review papers as I would like. For that reason, my view may be a bit outdated, but one thing I remember finding incredibly useful about review papers is that they provided a venue for speculation. In the typical "experimental report" sort of paper, the focus is typically narrowed to a knifes edge around the hypothesi…

My feelings about that outsider thing are pretty mixed. On one hand I'm the person who implemented the endorsement system for arXiv. I also got a PhD in physics did a postdoc in physics then left the field. I can't say that I was mistreated, but I saw one of the stars of the field today crying every night when he was a postdoc because he was so dedicated to his work and the job market was so brutal -- so I can say it…

> crackpot submissions were a tiny fraction of submission to arXiv but they would have been half the submissions to certain fields like quantum gravity

Just some very outsider thought:

Could it be that this problem is rather self-inflected by researchers and their marketing?

Physicists market all the time that resolving these questions about quantum gravity will give the answers to the deepest questions that plagued philosophers over millenia. Well, such a marketing attracts crackpots who do believe that they have something to tell about such topics.

Relatedly, to improve their chances of getting research funding, a lot of researchers do an outreach to the general public to show the importance of the questions that they work on. Of course this means that people from the general pyblic who now get interested in such questions will make their own attempt to make a contribution because - well, this researcher just told me how important it is to think about such questions. Of course such a person from the general public typically does not have the deep scientific knowledge such that their contribution meets the high scientific standards.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#262

Post by fc417fc802 » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 12:35 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #247

DANmode wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

But this is already how the purse holders operate. A big group of experts get together and vote on which grant proposals within a given category to fund.

I think it comes down to how the system is structured and how many players there are. The more difficult it is for a small cult to capture control of the funding (or access to instrumentation or awarding of degrees or whatever) for a given area the less likely you are to end up with a monoculture.

Assuming the majority of the funding continues to come from governments then you have a centralized point of leverage that can shape the system. So it should be possible to impose constraints that result in a system that actively prevents monocultures from developing.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#263

Post by fc417fc802 » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 1:12 AM UTC

pie_flavor wrote: post #207

hijodelsol wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You may have delivered value in peer review, but on the whole, peer review delivers negative value. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-... The arXiv vs journal debate seems a lot like 'should the work get done, or should the work get certified' that you see all over 'institutions', and if the certification does not actually catch frauds or errors, it's not making the foundations stronger, whi…

Can't say I agree with that position.

Responding largely to the linked article, you can't just ignore the massive increase in funding and associated output that occurred. Scaling almost any system up will be expected to result in creative new failure modes. It's easy to observe that a system isn't great and suppose that removing it would improve things but this very often isn't the case. Democracy is one such example.

There's also the publishing ecosystem that developed around the increased funding. It isn't clear to me why any blame (if it's even valid, see preceding paragraph) should be laid at the feet of the practice of peer reviewing publications rather than such an obviously dysfunctional institution.

Even if we accept the way in which publications have been undergoing peer review to somehow be the root of all evil (as opposed to the for profit publication of taxpayer funded work) - there's more than one way to go about it! A glaringly obvious problem, mentioned in the linked article yet not meaningfully addressed that I saw, is that peer reviewers aren't paid. If this was a compensated task presumably it would be performed much more rigorously. Building inspectors aren't volunteers and they seem to do a good enough job.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#264

Post by fc417fc802 » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC

auggierose wrote: post #161

contubernio wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Fields medal was awarded based mainly on this paper never published elsewhere: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0211159

I think there is a misunderstanding here. Does arXiv count as a publication? Yes, pretty much anything that gives you a DOI does, for example Zenodo. Does it function as a reputable anything? No. The paper you link to counts as a publication, but its reputation stands on its own, it has nothing to do with arXiv as a venue. Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't, just by publishing in certain venues yo…

> Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't

We require a method of filtering such that a given researcher doesn't have to personally vet in excruciating detail every paper he comes across because there simply isn't enough time in the day for that.

Ideally such a system would individually for each paper provide a multi-dimensional score that was reputable. How can those be calculated in a manner such that they're reputable? Who knows; that exercise is left for the reader.

In practice "well it got published in Nature" makes for a pretty decent spam filter followed by metrics such as how many times it's been cited since publication, checking that the people citing it are independent authors who actually built directly on top of the work, and checking how many of such citing authors are from a different field.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#265

Post by jltsiren » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 1:55 AM UTC

observationist wrote: post #257

hijodelsol wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's the value of academic publishing over the arxiv model of freely publishing, free access, and a global, vigorous discussion across a wide range of platforms, with experts, researchers, amateurs, institutions, and the peanut gallery all having the opportunity to participate? What possible value does a journal like Nature, for example, bring to the table by claiming a paper for themselves and charging people for…

The value is the ability to do science as a career without being independently wealthy.

Politicians, administrators, donors, and taxpayers don't want scientists deciding on their own how to spend the money. They want control over what gets funded. They want funding decisions with justifications they can understand. But they don't understand the science itself, so they need "objective" metrics to support the decisions. And because those metrics matter, people will inevitably game them.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#266

Post by nickpsecurity » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 2:20 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #249

lokar wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think your phrasing was good. A lot of people conflate a work being published is equivalent to peer reviewed and that "peer reviewed" means "correct". I think when you think about publishing as what it actually is, researchers communicating to researchers, what I said makes much more sense. I do think formal review does help reduce slop but I think anyone who has published anything is also very aware of how noisy t…

There's a lot of stuff with basic errors in peer reviewed journals. Things also can get rejected for anything from formatting to politics.

I like Arxiv better. I get the paper, know it's probably not reviewed (like in many journals), and review it if I want to. I used to ise Citeseerx, too, to get tons of CompSci papers. Even better, OpenReview might have some good observations.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#267

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 2:39 AM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #183

bjourne wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really am not sure about that: https://biologue.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/05... The problem is that "optimizing for peer-review" is not the same thing as optimizing for quality. E.g., I like to add a few tongue-in-cheeks to entertain the reader. But then I have to worry endlessly about anal-retentive reviewers who refuse to see the big picture.

Currently a kind of rule of thumb is that a PhD student can graduate after approximately 3 papers published in a good peer reviewed venue. If peer review were to go away, this whole academic system would get into a crisis. It's dysfunctional and has many problems but it's kinda load bearing for the system to chug along.

Maybe their institution should evaluate whether their papers pass muster? It's the one conferring the degree.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#268

Post by fsckboy » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 3:05 AM UTC

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…

>We've seen the kind of appeasement prose from their statement and FAQ [1] countless times before

what are you referring to, who is being appeased who shouldn't be? what are you worried about happening?

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#269

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 3:22 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #264

auggierose wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a misunderstanding here. Does arXiv count as a publication? Yes, pretty much anything that gives you a DOI does, for example Zenodo. Does it function as a reputable anything? No. The paper you link to counts as a publication, but its reputation stands on its own, it has nothing to do with arXiv as a venue. Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't, just by publishing in certain venues yo…

> Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't We require a method of filtering such that a given researcher doesn't have to personally vet in excruciating detail every paper he comes across because there simply isn't enough time in the day for that. Ideally such a system would individually for each paper provide a multi-dimensional score that was reputable. How can those be calculated in a manner such that…

Can't we do better than that?

PageRank was a decent solution for websites. Can't we treat citations as a graph, calculate per-author and per-paper trustworthiness scores, update when a paper gets retracted, and mix in a dash of HN-style community upvotes/downvotes and openly-viewable commentary and Q&A by a community of experts and nonexperts alike?

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#270

Post by kingstnap » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 3:35 AM UTC

hereme888 wrote: post #173

From my limited experience, arXiv appears to include many low-quality, unreproducible papers, and some are straight-up self-marketing rather than serious scientific work.

If you get some more experience you will find normal journals are exactly like that as well.