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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

#81

Post by simplestats »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #65
HerrMonnezza wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (…

Well, if all one wants is an "audience" one can simply report the results of their research on twitter. Much bigger audience. But that's not the point, is it? The point is that you want someone who knows their shit, to review your paper, and who will have both the knowledge and the motivation to engage with your work critically and help you see what is behind all those big blind spots we all have for our own work. I'…

People cite preprints in their references. So as an expert you can find the preprints that others based their work one. And you can use a tool like google scholar to find preprints that cite a particular work to build on it. It fits neatly into the same old systems experts always used to find your work. And is much faster.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#82

Post by henrydark »

buro9 wrote: post #19
henrydark wrote: post #5

The two sites I start my day with: hacker news and arxiv.

Do you read the /new submissions for particular topics? HN is a nice tidy list of top things, is there an equivalent for ArXiv?

Yup, I read the daily abstracts of Representation Theory (math.RT), Number Theory (math.NT) and Programming Languages (cs.PL)

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#83

Post by currymj »

atomack wrote: post #44
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 art…

In ML at least, the arXiv version is the “canonical” one. This is because the conferences have onerous page limits, so the official conference version is usually mangled with lots of cut content. The arXiv will have content restored and be more readable.

In theory you should read arXiv and cite the conference version, but often people cite arXiv and nobody cares because google scholar mostly combines things properly.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#84

Post by kgwgk »

bee_rider wrote: post #79
krastanov wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, in most of physics there is no such limit in practice. The only difference between my published work and the preprint arxiv versions is the font and whether the layout is two columns or one column. They are word-for-word identical with identical figures.

Is it possible that you broke the rules of your journal, but nobody mothers going after a single researcher?

I'm not krastanov and everything is possible, but many publishers do not have such rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_publishers_by...

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#85

Post by itchyjunk »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #62
atomack wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 art…

This is not the case in computer science and particularly machine learning, especially in recent years. You'll find many papers where a majority of references are to preprints that stay preprints for ever. You'll also find many papers that have hundreds of citations, all while remaining preprints forever (and many of those citations are from forever-preprints themselves). In machine learning, for the most part, arxiv…

Can everyone put their half baked papers on arxiv? I see people on irc discussing about finding sponsors for their paper and what not and how this part not being trivial at all. I don't know the details about how the sponsoring works for arxiv but seems like it doesn't let everyone post their half papers, at the very least.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#86

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

bopbeepboop wrote: post #68
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if all one wants is an "audience" one can simply report the results of their research on twitter. Much bigger audience. But that's not the point, is it? The point is that you want someone who knows their shit, to review your paper, and who will have both the knowledge and the motivation to engage with your work critically and help you see what is behind all those big blind spots we all have for our own work. I'…

In mathematics, it’s a continuum: Discussion starts in blog posts, on Twitter, in conversations. Then longer blog posts and code demos. Then pre-prints and more blog posts about that. Then finally journal. You get incredibly less review at the publication stage — and your idea “experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet is hilariously wrong.

>> You get incredibly less review at the publication stage — and your idea “experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet is hilariously wrong.

I'm glad to hear you're amused by my comment. Where did I express the idea that '“experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet'? Can you please show me?

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#87

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

time_to_smile wrote: post #66
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…

> With peer-review you know that someone will read your work that has the background to understand it and to catch errors. This is a remarkably naive (and charmingly optimistic) view of peer-review. For the vast majority of the history of academic research peer review did not play a major part. It wasn't until the 1970s that the modern day peer review system emerged and it did so as a reaction to a funding crisis in…

>> This is a remarkably naive (and charmingly optimistic) view of peer-review.

Great way to join a convesation. Well done.

I didn't say anything about "the vast majority of history of academic research". I talked about my experience of peer review of my work. Are you responding to someone else's comment but quoting mine?

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#88

Post by manquer »

onion2k wrote: post #17
manquer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arxiv is a indirect threat to publications. Publications lobby the government and also influence university grants and other bodies. We still don't have a proper open /free tax filing too from the IRS or tax computed by IRS only for us to verify/confirm as in some of other countries, primarily because intuit (and others) lobbied to make sure the government would never develop one (encoded in law no less), so it is no…

Arxiv is a indirect threat to publications. It's incredibly annoying that publications try to continue to exist in order to act as a gatekeeper to exclusive papers. If journals added real value by peer-reviewing, collating, curating, offering editorial opinion etc then the fact papers are also available in the raw state somewhere else wouldn't much of a threat.

You don't need publications of course, both are competing to own a social network and derive their strength from users that is the threat.

An online ecosystem like Arxiv can very easily supersede a journal if they want to.

For example Arxiv say could deploy a public peer review process i.e. reviews, criticisms and comments on the paper could be available next to paper in Arxiv without a lot of effort technically. Similarly curation and collation could easily taken up for free by community. Any of this would upend journals in quality or throughput easily. There are no problems journals solve that online cannot do better not even exclusivity they charge so much for.

After all there are enough people to moderate reddit or do various quality control tasks in StackOverflow for not much benefit, researchers who curate on Arxiv could easily be found and they may even get a job boost.

Building that community and acceptance is the hard part everything else is relatively trival.

--

Open Access especially for government funded research should be mandatory. Same for software, any thing government invests to develop should be open source.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#89

Post by bopbeepboop »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #86
bopbeepboop wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In mathematics, it’s a continuum: Discussion starts in blog posts, on Twitter, in conversations. Then longer blog posts and code demos. Then pre-prints and more blog posts about that. Then finally journal. You get incredibly less review at the publication stage — and your idea “experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet is hilariously wrong.

>> You get incredibly less review at the publication stage — and your idea “experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet is hilariously wrong. I'm glad to hear you're amused by my comment. Where did I express the idea that '“experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet'? Can you please show me?

No post body was provided.

Re: Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning

#90

Post by krastanov »

bee_rider wrote: post #79
krastanov wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, in most of physics there is no such limit in practice. The only difference between my published work and the preprint arxiv versions is the font and whether the layout is two columns or one column. They are word-for-word identical with identical figures.

Is it possible that you broke the rules of your journal, but nobody mothers going after a single researcher?

In my particular case, no, there were no pro-forma rules broken.
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