The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org
The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#2It's fascinating to imagine what the arxiv of the future would look like.
I imagine all scientific publications available on a distrusted block store, including raw emails, data and notes on a voluntary basis.
Stuff that could be published would include reviews, corrections in version control fashion, and enough metadata to model scientific progress.
What this article is describing sounds reasonable but not game changing.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#3I don't usually read long articles on my phone but the design of that page on my Pixel 6 was just so perfect! I hope this becomes the norm!
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#4One thing I would love to see from the arxiv sites is a publicly available download of an SQLite database. They have a bunch of PDFs, and latex source - but the real killer would be a database with just the text for each section, and then the ability to generate* the pdf, using various different styles. This would save an enormous amount of space, and make things far more tidy.
I suppose the images could be stored in the SQLite as blobs, but there's probably a better way with vector dbs or something.
That's what the future will probably look like. With the SQLite decentralized on IPFS or torrent, where only queries get stored on each computer, making more popular queries faster to load (more peers).
*(or maybe an archive of a tons of zstd parquets for each table? - Not sure what the best way to organize several tables in parquet is yet)
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#5I read this article the other day, "There are four schools of thought on reforming peer review" [1] about how there's four schools of thought about how to reform publishing and peer review. Each of them independently are fairly well received and makes sense in itself, at least among my academic circles. However, there are tensions between them, so it's hard to come up with a solution that's universally satisfying to even the majority of stakeholders.
This article about ArXiv is clearly in the "Democracy and Transparency school" as categorized article, but it doesn't yet address the other three camps. The arxiv article proposes machine-readable semantics, easier sharing and discoverability, papers + supplementary materials + reviews all open; this floods the world with even more publications with varying quality, so it's even harder to identify good quality work; and when things can be more easily aggregated by machines and measured with the alternative metrics proposed, it often leads to a more powerful winner-takes-all system that can be gamed (there's now a subtle game of increasing citations that appear on Google Scholar); finally, with an increase in submissions and materials that go along with submissions, it puts an even greater strain on the review system. These problems are not unsolvable, but almost every idea I've seen proposed so far has only been in a single camp, and there's side effects that harm the goals of the other three camps. So I'd love to see more ideas that balance the interests of all four camps that want to reform peer review and publishing.
[1]: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/03/24/th...
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#6One thing I would love to see from the arxiv sites is a publicly available download of an SQLite database . They have a bunch of PDFs, and latex source - but the real killer would be a database with just the text for each section, and then the ability to generate* the pdf, using various different styles. This would save an enormous amount of space, and make things far more tidy. I suppose the images could be stored i…
> This would save an enormous amount of space, and make things far more tidy.
Why? The output pdf is typically smaller than the input that produces it. Using rendered pdfs seems simple and very natural, and at worst can use twice the total amount of space.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#7This seems... ambitious.
I think ArXiv (edit: Actually this is not by ArXiv, but some other group) is drastically over-estimating the desire to submit papers to their service. They are popular because they host the documents you were going to produce, in the format that the journals expect. The production of a Arxiv appropriate document is a side effect of the actual job, which is writing a paper to submit to a journal (hey, I'm as unhappy as you are that this is the actual job, but everyone hates publish-or-perish, if it could be overthrown it would have been).
"Getting academics to act in a way that is not directly in their self-interest because they just love sharing information" is a usually a pretty safe bet, but I think this would be a bit too far. Unless ArXiv can somehow get journals to expect their format (good luck!) I think this is going to be hard.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#8I don't usually read long articles on my phone but the design of that page on my Pixel 6 was just so perfect! I hope this becomes the norm!
This is precisely their point. Reading the usual Arxiv-PDF on a phone is a pain, even if you just want to glance at some key parts of the text. Their version is much, much better. It's self-promotion by the Authorea team on the platform they are competing with (ArXiv), but they have a point.
Arxiv needs to go HTML.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#9Readers may find the Octopus project interesting:
> Designed to replace journals and papers as the place to establish priority and record your work in full detail, Octopus is free to use and publishes all kinds of scientific work, whether it is a hypothesis, a method, data, an analysis or a peer review.
> Publication is instant. Peer review happens openly. All work can be reviewed and rated.
> Your personal page records everything you do and how it is rated by your peers.
> Octopus encourages meritocracy, collaboration and a fast and effective scientific process.
> Created in partnership with the UK Reproducibility Network.
Re: The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
#10The authors first list some issues with arXiv. Next, they describe how to fix those issues. Then the good news arrives: this improved arXiv already exists. It's called Authorea.com. All three authors are Authorea.com employees. They do disclose it as their affiliation. Still, this is essentially an ad written in LaTeX.
They correctly point out a few of the limitations of arXiv (mostly: static LaTeX and PDFs). But I profoundly dislike the other things they propose:
1. "open comments and reviews". I have no problem with open reviews on a third-party website, but arXiv is literally a "distribution service". It has one job and does it pretty well. I don't want it to turn into Reddit or (worse?) ResearchGate.
2. "alternative metrics". Enough with the metrics already. We all know they're destructive, at least all that have been tried so far. I didn't even know that arXiv showed some bibliometrics (because they are thankfully hidden behind default-disabled switches). Their proposed alternatives? "How many times a paper has been downloaded, tweeted, or blogged." I am not joking, this is what they propose to include in addition to citations. Seriously???
PS: Just a heads-up to anyone who, like me, would be wondering about the ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org link. The article is a regular paper submitted to arXiv. The authors do not belong to the organization maintaining arXiv. The usual link is: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020
The ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org thing is an experimental html5 paper viewer by the arXiv people.
Edit: typos.