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Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#41

Post by Karellen »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #37
IshKebab wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With peer-review you know that someone will read your work that has the background to understand it and to catch errors. That's overly optimistic. What you mean is "with peer-review you know that someone will at least skim your work and maybe catch errors." I agree with the rest of your points though. Zero peer review is probably not a great solution.

Honestly the esteem of peer-review does not hold up to the reality of peer-review. It's elevated to this gold standard for quality science, but in practice, it's just not. Not only is some of the real landmarks in science older than peer review as we know it today (until the middle of 20th century, articles were reviewed by an editor), in several fields, 50-90% of peer-reviewed studies fail to replicate. It's very po…

> in several fields, 50-90% of peer-reviewed studies fail to replicate.

Is that a failure of peer-review though? Or is it more of a consequence that even if you do everything right you'll still get some false positives some of the time, and negative results tend not to get published at all?

(i.e. the problem that pre-registration for medical trials hopes to solve - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preregistration_(science) )

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#42

Post by demygale »

astrange wrote: post #34
WHA8m wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discard the last sentence. You're talking in absolute terms and that's leading nowhere. It's been some time, but this is what came to my mind immediately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei That you can not rely on the rich to put their money in good use with the general public in mind is right. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? Definitely not.

The anti-charity people get around their absolutism by inventing "mutual aid", which is what they call charity when they like it. (similar thing in education involved deciding "equality" was bad, so they invented "equity", which is the same thing except they like it.)

Mutual aid is decentralized charity, the aid comes from the community instead of a NGO.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#43

Post by domenicrosati »

HerrMonnezza wrote: post #8

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:…

Just anecdotally, Ive had a paper rejected once from arxiv. I am glad they did... it was not a very good one. Every other time thought has been fine

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#44

Post by atomack »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #31

What you lose on arxiv is peer review. That might sound like a feature- you get to let others know of your results faster- but if you make a mistake it will not be caught until it's out in the wild (and possibly until everyone has already cited it and based their own work on it). With peer-review you know that someone will read your work that has the background to understand it and to catch errors. So what, you'll sa…

The way we used arxiv worked well in physics, though this is 15 years ago now so might have changed since.

arxiv was about distribution. It didn't replace peer review - articles were still submitted to journals and published there too.

If an article was posted to arxiv and not a journal, the odds of a citation went down massively. And the journal it was submitted to was a factor in whether or not we read it. When articles were eventually published, most authors also updated the preprint with the post peer review version.

Basically it meant that (1) it was easy to keep up to date with what everyone was working on, and pick up interesting new stuff (2) most citations, post 80s, you saw in whatever paper you were reading, you could look up on arxiv and be reading it in seconds.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#45

Post by throwaway81523 »

I wonder if anyone remembers Advogato and its certification/reputation system. It claimed to be very difficult to subvert. I'm sure that was naive and it held up because nobody back then was that motivated to game it, but even today, a little human oversight could probably steady it. So I wonder if something like it could be used for arxiv, relieving some of the endorser/moderation stuff that they have now.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#46

Post by marginalia_nu »

Karellen wrote: post #41
marginalia_nu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the esteem of peer-review does not hold up to the reality of peer-review. It's elevated to this gold standard for quality science, but in practice, it's just not. Not only is some of the real landmarks in science older than peer review as we know it today (until the middle of 20th century, articles were reviewed by an editor), in several fields, 50-90% of peer-reviewed studies fail to replicate. It's very po…

> in several fields, 50-90% of peer-reviewed studies fail to replicate. Is that a failure of peer-review though? Or is it more of a consequence that even if you do everything right you'll still get some false positives some of the time, and negative results tend not to get published at all? (i.e. the problem that pre-registration for medical trials hopes to solve - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preregistration_(scien…

> Is that a failure of peer-review though?

It raises questions around using peer-review as a mark of scientific quality. If it is, why does peer reviewed science time and time again turn out to have enormous glaring quality problems?

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#47

Post by [deleted] »

ahelwer wrote: post #9
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because you cannot rely on the rich to fund common goods through voluntary donations. It is not a good idea and never will be. Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill.

[deleted]

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#48

Post by [deleted] »

WHA8m wrote: post #20
ahelwer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you cannot rely on the rich to fund common goods through voluntary donations. It is not a good idea and never will be. Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill.

Discard the last sentence. You're talking in absolute terms and that's leading nowhere. It's been some time, but this is what came to my mind immediately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei That you can not rely on the rich to put their money in good use with the general public in mind is right. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? Definitely not.

[deleted]

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#49

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

ahelwer wrote: post #9
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because you cannot rely on the rich to fund common goods through voluntary donations. It is not a good idea and never will be. Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill.

A lot very confident statements there.

> Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill.

This is very broad and incorrect statement that I suggest you research more before stating as fact. Maybe start with libraries in the 19th and 20th century if you don’t know where to start.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#50

Post by HerrMonnezza »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #31

What you lose on arxiv is peer review. That might sound like a feature- you get to let others know of your results faster- but if you make a mistake it will not be caught until it's out in the wild (and possibly until everyone has already cited it and based their own work on it). With peer-review you know that someone will read your work that has the background to understand it and to catch errors. So what, you'll sa…

> What you lose on arxiv is peer review.

Or, instead, you get a much larger audience reviewing your article, instead of the 2 to 4 reviewers involved in the paper publishing process :-)

You can get comments from critical and interested readers, you upload a new version of the paper to arXiv, and repeat the process until the article is ready for submission/publishing.

In other words: I think that an article on arXiv (on average and as a whole, individual articles may be exceptional) is subject to much wider and more extensive scrutiny and verification than the average article during the paper publication process.

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