8 ms·
A Reboot of the Legendary Physics Site ArXiv Could Shape Open Science
- PepeGomez 10y agoWeird, but the article seems to be paywalled.
- crispyambulance 10y agoNo, they just detect if you're using adblocker and put up a block screen if you are. Sorry Wired, but too many newspaper websites have abused their advertising privilege for me to ever read a newspaper without an adblocker again.
- a_imho 10y agoHow is trying to detect what kind of software I'm running is not a violation of CFAA https://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act_%28CFAA%29 https://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act_%... , especially the exceeding authorization part? IANAL and not from the US, guess it not really applies to me, still, I won't be sad the day wired and co goes down the drain.
- erubin 10y agoposted behind a paywall on wired...
- fareesh 10y agono paywall for me - is it geotargetted?
- tmalsburg2 10y agoWhat's wrong with that? As far as I know the point of open science is that research publications should be open not everything else, too. For non-science publications like newspapers I actually prefer payed access over ad-supported access.
- pmontra 10y agoWorkaround: open the link in a private window.
- a_bonobo 10y agoI see an anti-ad wall, when I whitelist the page or turn off the adblocker it works
- paride5745 10y agoClean Firefox (no addons) from Italy, no paywall or ad-wall. I have the no-tracking enabled in the FF preferences and I'm on Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS.
- joelthelion 10y agoI just hope they don't wreck ArXiv in the process.
- nemoniac 10y agoSo arxiv served about 105000 different articles last year. I'm curious how much it cost and how that compares with what the big publishing houses tell us that should cost for their version of "open" publishing.
- pfortuny 10y agoIt served those many articles but none (repeat, none) of them are peer-reviewed just by being there (unless they have been (by some journal) after being posted on the arxiv).
- mseri 10y agoIn most of arXiv supported fields (if not all) people do peer review for free. It's assumed as part of your academic job
- pfortuny 10y agoYes, I know, but they need to be contacted and that is part of their curriculum as well (referee for XXX, YYY, etc.). And the administrative nightmare of peer review is not to be taken lightly.
- capnrefsmmat 10y agoThe arXiv 2016 budget is online: https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/culpublic/arXiv+Sustainability+Initiative?preview=/127116484/329816057/CY16arXivBudget.pdf https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/culpublic/arXiv+Susta... They estimate spending just over a million dollars this year, funded via members (university libraries contributing a few thousand dollars each) and grants. However, as I always point out, we must remember that the costs of a published journal are higher for reasons other than profit: journal articles are typically converted to HTML and XML via semi-automated processes with manual proofing and tweaking, production staff and some editors (for the biggest journals) are paid salaries, peer review involves chasing down deadline-abusing academics over weeks or months and building some kind of review tracking system, articles have to be reliably archived (e.g. lockss.org), and so on. Then add that most journals are still printed and distributed by mail for some reason, and you have extra full-time staff and equipment. I wouldn't want to throw all of that away and just keep the arXiv. Ditching print makes sense, some things can be better automated (we need better tools than LaTeX or Word to prepare papers, so they can easily be produced in PDF, HTML, or semantic XML form), and some services are unnecessary (I've had journals copy-edit my articles and make no useful changes), but I don't want to just read crappily-formatted base LaTeX from the arXiv with no frills either. (Incidentally, PLOS is non-profit and still has to charge over $1000 per article in PLOS ONE, to pay for the professional staff and all the manual manuscript conversion gunk. Biologists love Word, so converting must be hell.)
- charles_dickens 10y agoInteresting to see their approach and the reasons why they are not building more features on top of ArXiv. Although comments on papers might be a dangerous area to venture into there are definitely places on the web where the ability to annotate and comment papers is helping science move forward. A good example is the Polymath project and Terry Tao's blog. Tao's recent solution to the Erdos discrepancy problem,an 80-year-old number theory problem, was actually triggered by a comment on his blog. Another example is www.fermatslibrary.com. Although the papers in the platform are more historical/foundational, they were able to get consistently good/constructive comments that help people understand papers better.
- egjerlow 10y agoWould you elaborate on why you think comments on papers might be dangerous? For me it seems like the most natural step forward, given where we are today. As I see it, it would solve many issues. Ideally, we would move away from a publication-count metric, and more onto a reputation-based metric. It would lower the bar for participation in scientific discussion, make reproducibility more important, and generally be a healthy thing for science as a whole, I think. But I want to hear opposing viewpoints!
- xioxox 10y agoI don't think comments would be useful. To make a proper comment on a paper requires a significant amount of work (as does refereeing). Lowering the barrier to entry would produce some first impressions, the usual moans about lack of citation and misunderstandings. If a paper deserves a serious comment, I think the proper format for that is another paper. Although citations are horrible metrics, I think some sort of reputation ratings based on quick likes would be even worse and even easier to game.
- Aeolun 10y agoThe only thing you have to do to make comments worthwhile is restrict them to actual academics. Even if they went on to post shit, it would only destroy their own reputation.
- thomasahle 10y agoI hope they take inspiration from the Arxiv Sanity Preserver: http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/ http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/ Also, ArXiv has a lot more than physics. Here's a map over all the papers: http://paperscape.org/ http://paperscape.org/
- conjectures 10y agoIf this happens, there's a lot to be learned from Stack Exchange on how to do this well. The stats.stackexchange.com site is actually pretty high quality IMHO. Arxiv could use some of that reputation & moderation structure to regulate content. Cranks and time-wasters could be sidelined. It would certainly work much better than a typical newspaper comments section. It would work by establishing expectations of how much substance should be in a response to a paper. Then getting the community to pitch in on the quality of responses. You still get echo-chamber effects with this, but the quality filter is generally worth it.
- freddref 10y agoI really like the idea of using something similar to the stack overflow model to help with peer review. It could open up the peer review process to more people for a longer period of time, giving a higher chance that more people will contribute if there is interest and a higher overall quality of discussion. All contributions give you a clear increase in reputation points. Groups of academics could band together to form online-only journals on a specific topic and then allocate medals to papers that are considered accepted. So while there may be many loose papers out there with little or no comments (like on axiv currently) only a few will get the seal of approval.
- conjectures 10y agoFWIW I'd like to see this kind of model join the publishing landscape. It's galling that academics do peer review unpaid for the most part, only for publishers to get in the way of access. Open peer review definitely needs working on.
- HelloNurse 10y agoI would fear fabricated likes and positive comments about "our" papers and fabricated un-likes and negative comments about "their" papers; academic cliques and individual professors can leverage their students to pollute any StackExchange-like mechanism, and if they have too few slaves there are plenty of PR firms to do the job.
- drole 10y agoI find that these discussions of "to comment and like" or "not to comment and like" always misses the mark. Both sides of the discussion have solid arguments and I find it hard to imagine the discussion ever resolving itself to anything thereby keeping a status quo noone is really satisfied with. The problem is that most peoples frame of reference when talking about comments and "likes" is the facebook, reddit or [insert some publisher] model. That is all fine and dandy as a starting point, but let's not forget that all of those models are specifically engineered to keep people posting and liking as much as possible rather than focusing on like and comment quality. There is no reason, or at least i don't see it, why a different model focusing on like and comment quality could not be engineered. Furthermore, if such a model could be engineered well enough, I don't see why a comment and like section of arxiv could not contribute to furthering science as a whole. With that in mind a much more fruitful and positive discussion could be had about "how do we create a comment and like section where everyones interests are protected?" rather than the old back and forth discussion of easing barrier of entry vs quality. As others have noted much better starting points for the above discussion could be the stack-overflow model or something similar.
- Aardwolf 10y agoI currently really like the site as-is. Useful links to useful PDFs :) The article says it's a physics site, but I use it more for Mathematics and Computer Science. The HTML is small and loads fast and automatically works on mobile because it's just simple HTML. I hope the reboot won't mean huge bloated HTML+JS, and then a "mobile" version that has less features than what it has right now. P.S. the wired article talks about arxiv.org but doesn't have a single clickable link that goes to it??!!
- antome 10y agoAs the W3C core styles from the 2000s and even earlier can attest to, good page styling is timeless, and ArXiv can very likely improve its design with no extra bloat. Some like ultramarine and "modernist" really don't hold up, but others I can easily imagine on a well-designed page in 2016. https://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/preview.html https://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/preview.html
- mohsinr 10y agoExactly, not a single link to the site. Had to google and find: Here it is just in case: https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/
- vanderZwan 10y agoWelcome to modern web articles, where every link points back to more articles of the same website. For example: > As one of the first open access science sites, this redesign may influence the paths of its younger siblings, like biologists’ bioRxiv whether they follow the same route or rebel against it. There's a link in the article.. which links to a Wired article on bioRxiv[0], but not to bioRxiv[1] itself. And before you ask: no, the article on bioRxiv does not link to bioRxiv. [0] http://www.wired.com/2016/02/the-rainbow-unicorn-trying-real-hard-to-transform-biology-publishing/ http://www.wired.com/2016/02/the-rainbow-unicorn-trying-real... [1] http://biorxiv.org/ http://biorxiv.org/
- aschampion 10y agoMy favorite is pop science reporting never linking to the press release for the publication that it's pulling from, much less to the publication itself. Often the title of the article isn't even mentioned.
- jessriedel 10y agoOne argument for conservatism: if physicists want a commenting system, why hasn't SciRate taken off?: https://scirate.com/ https://scirate.com/ The interface is clean, it has a lot of nice features, etc. It's gotten some traction in quantum info (my field), but the comments are rarely used. You can chalk this up to network effects (chicken-and-egg), which direct arXiv hosting could solve, but that problem can probably be eliminated by taking the minimal step of allowing the authors to link to the SciRate page from the arXiv page. No, I think the major feature about having the arXiv host comments directly is that it would force physicists to engage with folks who comment on their paper, because otherwise there would be unanswered criticism attached ("stapled") directly to their public-facing papers. Maybe that's what we want, but that's a huge step and there are a lot of ways for it to go badly. Here is a mockup that Paul Gisparg made for author-curated links on arXiv article pages. See the "Author suggestions" column on the right: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/arxiv/1212.3061-mockup.html http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/arxiv/1212.3061-mockup.h... Allowing links to places like SciRate plausible solves most of the chicken-or-egg problem by allowing the author to designate "the" place for public discussion without picking a particular site to win or lose, or bundling release of a paper with forced public discussion. Shameless plug: folks here may be interested in my blog post about the future of academic papers and how the arXiv influences that: http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxiv/ http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi... There was good discussion on HN last year when it was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9415985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9415985
- ap22213 10y agoI am a non-academic who reads a lot of academic papers. I love arXiv, and I probably spend too much time on there. Here's my 10-minute take on scirate (from viewing it on a mobile browser). Overall, I don't immediately see any added value. The layout and design isn't great - not on mobile at least. The main view isn't optimized for what I want to see. There's a huge navigation tree that takes up all the view space. Then, it shows me a list of ranked papers that are not of interest to me. It forces me to register to access any features. I don't see comments on any of the papers, only a Reddit-style rating. Do I have to register to see the comments? Overall, I don't think I'd ever go back. But, maybe it wasn't designed with my type of use cases in mind.
- auvi 10y agoI am not sure why it is called "Legendary". What's the legend here?
- dalke 10y agoLike many words, "legendary" has multiple meanings, and the correct one needs to be inferred from context. A dictionary can help if something, like this, doesn't makes sense. For example, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legendary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legendary says: > 1: of, relating to, or characteristic of legend or a legend > 2: well-known, famous It seems you only knew of the first definition, when the article uses the second.
- hyperion2010 10y agoAggregation and curation should remain separate. Perhaps the most useful thing would be for arxiv (or some other entity) to collect links from known curatorion sources to aid in the evaluation of papers.
- westurner 10y agoI've written up a few ideas about PDFs, edges, and reproducibility (in particular); with the Hashtags #LinkedReproducibility (and #MetaResearch) https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LinkedReproducibility https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LinkedReproducibility https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MetaResearch https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MetaResearch - schema.org/MedicalTrialDesign enumerations could/should be extended to all of science (and then added to all of these PDFs without structured edge types like e.g. {intendedToReproduce, seemsToReproduce} (which then have specific ensuing discussions)) - http://health-lifesci.schema.org/MedicalTrialDesign http://health-lifesci.schema.org/MedicalTrialDesign - there should be a way to evaluate controls in a structured, blinded, meta-analytic way - PDF is pretty, but does not support RDFa (because this is a graph) ... notes here: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/data-science#linked-reproducibility https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/data-science#linked-reprod... (edit) please feel free to implement any of these ideas (e.g. CC0)
- westurner 10y ago> a way to evaluate controls a way to evaluate premises (assumptions, controls, data, data transformations) and conclusions (presented as e.g. JSONLD, RDFa in a standard form (potentially like IPython/Jupyter .ipynb; but with an OrderedMap of I/O sequences with fixed #urifragment IDs)
- wodenokoto 10y agoI never browse arxiv, but access it a lot through other services. I kind of like that model. Have the site being good at what it is best at, and help other services provide further services, such as search (google scholar) or stricter moderation and commenting and discussion.