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Indeed it's possible in theory to do flag planting without arxiv, for example by posting a timestamped technical report to an institutional repository, but it
by Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
Indeed it's possible in theory to do flag planting without
arxiv, for example by posting a timestamped technical report to an institutional repository, but it has never been a common thing. Probably because you don't get much of an audience, so people won't cite you unless you bug them in reviews. And if someone publishes the idea some months later in a paper, they will probably get credit as there's the reasonable assumption they just hadn't read your report.
On the other hand, arxiv has a huge audience, lately maybe even more than DL/NLP conferences, making the flag planting really effective, especially if you are from a prestigious group. So there is a real problem now with large, prestigious groups posting half-assed preliminary results in arxiv, and deterring more modest groups from working on the problem or bogging them down because they now need to compare themselves to the well-known arxiv approach, which often has serious reproducibility issues because it has not been peer-reviewed.
I'm not an arxiv hater, in fact I check arxiv every day and for the last year or so I have posted most of my papers in it. But the problem is real and something must be done. Not about arxiv which is just the messenger (and a good one), but about the flag-planting culture using it that has emerged in the field.
- mostafab 9y ago>But the problem is real and something must be done I am working on a social network for papers that addresses this problem. Arxiv is too vulnerable to fake news articles because it is an archaic social network. I also think https://openreview.net https://openreview.net can be improved. You can check my project here : http://www.startcrowd.club http://www.startcrowd.club it does not have an anti fake news feature yet, but it is on the product roadmap.
- a3_nm 9y agoThanks a lot for bothering to explain the problem. I have never seen this in my field (theoretical computer science), so I wasn't really aware of the problem. (More accurately: reviewers may ask why you do not compare yourself to arXiv preprints, often with indulgence if they are recent, but I have not seen this culture emerge of posting half-baked results to arXiv to claim priority.) It appears that we agree that the problem is not with arXiv. Part of the problem is unsolvable: if prestigious groups can announce what they are working on and discourage other groups from working on the same problem, this may just be reasonable self-interest from the smaller groups and can hardly be avoided. As for reviewers asking for comparison to these works, I guess the problem lies with the reviewers: if an arXiv preprint has not been refereed and/or is hard to reproduce, it should be OK to say so in another paper and not be blamed for the lack of comparison. In any case, this is an interesting problem, thanks again for making me aware of it.