4 ms·

Long live arXiv.org, paid publications should be totally disrupted in 2020.

by suyash 7y ago

mpiedrav 7y ago
arXiv is a formidable resource. Yet, many scholars don't trust it as a source and won't publish there :( The argument from authority (e.g., publishing mafias) fallacy is ripe in academia. Same situation with textbooks. Besides profit and trying to become famous, there's no reason why a professor should publish through a traditional imprint or publisher (Pearson, Cengage, McGraw Hill, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Elsevier, etc.). LaTeX, a Creative Commons license, and a homepage at the university department (and perhaps a GitHub/GitLab repo) is all a professor needs to make textbooks available worldwide. Writing and editing a textbook is indeed a hard task. Yet, having the end result behind paywalls and arbitrary pricing isn't worth it.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  >> The argument from authority (e.g., publishing mafias) fallacy is ripe in academia. I believe the reason Arxiv is not trusted in some fields is that it's seen as a loophole that allows bad articles to avoid the filter of peer review and see the light of day. It would not be a problem if Arxiv was full of such articles, that would never cut it in an actual publication, but such articles are mixed with many that are eventually published and that just adds an amount of noise to the process that makes it hard to be sure what you're reading, especially if it doesn't exactly match your expertise. In other fields, e.g. in machine learning, putting your paper on Arxiv is de rigeur although of course that means anonymous reviewing goes out the window, so there's legitimiate concerns there also.
  - anjc 7y ago
    > It would not be a problem if Arxiv was full of such articles, that would never cut it in an actual publication, but such articles are mixed with many that are eventually published and that just adds an amount of noise to the process that makes it hard to be sure what you're reading I don't see this is a problem as, if you want to cite an arXiv paper, the responsibility on you increase, to ensure that the methodology etc is sound. This would be a better state of affairs than the "you must cite this highly cited paper just because it's a highly cited paper" situation we're in now.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      In practice, you only have to cite a highly cited paper if yours happens to be reviewd by a contributor to the highly cited paper.
      - anjc 7y ago
        Or by someone associated with them (in their lab, uni, co-authors as you mention etc). Essentially this means you must cite certain papers in some areas, as for larger conferences you're sure to be reviewed by such people.
- necovek 7y ago
  Textbooks and research papers are an entirely separate topics, imho. While it's easy to argue for textbooks to be openly available (just like education should be), there is no single reason for research papers not to be, since they purportedly advance science and human kind itself, and there is the demand of originality (if I can't access it, I can't establish if someone has not done it already).
mschuetz 7y ago
arXiv is a nice idea but I kinda hate it. It's not compatible with overleaf for no good reason at all. arXiv expects you to ship the source of the article + some sort of generated bib file of a specific version, instead of generating the bib file from the source. As a result, arXiv will fail to host overleaf generated content if both happen to use different versions of tex at the time. But I'm submitting the entire source to arXiv, so there is no good reason for arXiv to fail to produce a pdf from it! Gave up on arXiv because of that. I use overleaf to avoid all the Latex issues, and I'm absolutely not interested in supporting something that expects me to get back to wasting time on fixing latex issues instead of producing content.
- btrettel 7y ago
  Yes, even though I don't use Overleaf, I had a similar problem caused by arXiv using an older version of biblatex than I do. (I think bibtex's file format has been more stable and might work.) Switching to TeX Live 2016 (the distribution that arXiv uses) on my end as I recall seemed to be more trouble than it's worth. Instead I used an alternative preprint website where I only had to upload a PDF file.
- abhgh 7y ago
  Just delete the .bib file. arXiv only needs the .bbl file. What is confusing is even if you have both the .bib and .bbl, arXiv doesn't ignore the former, it raises an error anyway. Bad error reporting. Another tip if you're using overleaf: make sure your bibliography related warnings that overleaf points out, are gone too. Overleaf is resilient to these but arXiv is not.
  - mschuetz 7y ago
    I think the bbl file is what I meant. It's created from the source and bib file, and arXiv refuses to accept the one that is created by overleaf. I really dislike arXiv for demanding the full source and refusing pdfs, but then insisting you also provide a file that is generated from that source, but not accepting that file unless it's generated with specific builders.
qpiox 7y ago
Don't forget that arXiv is not recognized as a publisher of scientific work by nearly all universities, and you are only evaluated for papers published by well known venues.

Long live arXiv.org, paid publications should be totally disrupted in 2020.

by suyash 7y ago

Long live arXiv.org, paid publications should be totally disrupted in 2020.

arXiv is a formidable resource. Yet, many scholars don't trust it as a source and won't publish there :( The argument from authority (e.g., publishing mafias) fallacy is ripe in academia. Same situation with textbooks. Besides profit and trying to become famous, there's no reason why a professor should publish through a traditional imprint or publisher (Pearson, Cengage, McGraw Hill, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Elsevier, etc.). LaTeX, a Creative Commons license, and a homepage at the university department (and perhaps a GitHub/GitLab repo) is all a professor needs to make textbooks available worldwide. Writing and editing a textbook is indeed a hard task. Yet, having the end result behind paywalls and arbitrary pricing isn't worth it.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> The argument from authority (e.g., publishing mafias) fallacy is ripe in academia. I believe the reason Arxiv is not trusted in some fields is that it's seen as a loophole that allows bad articles to avoid the filter of peer review and see the light of day. It would not be a problem if Arxiv was full of such articles, that would never cut it in an actual publication, but such articles are mixed with many that are eventually published and that just adds an amount of noise to the process that makes it hard to be sure what you're reading, especially if it doesn't exactly match your expertise. In other fields, e.g. in machine learning, putting your paper on Arxiv is de rigeur although of course that means anonymous reviewing goes out the window, so there's legitimiate concerns there also.
- anjc 7y ago
  > It would not be a problem if Arxiv was full of such articles, that would never cut it in an actual publication, but such articles are mixed with many that are eventually published and that just adds an amount of noise to the process that makes it hard to be sure what you're reading I don't see this is a problem as, if you want to cite an arXiv paper, the responsibility on you increase, to ensure that the methodology etc is sound. This would be a better state of affairs than the "you must cite this highly cited paper just because it's a highly cited paper" situation we're in now.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    In practice, you only have to cite a highly cited paper if yours happens to be reviewd by a contributor to the highly cited paper.
    - anjc 7y ago
      Or by someone associated with them (in their lab, uni, co-authors as you mention etc). Essentially this means you must cite certain papers in some areas, as for larger conferences you're sure to be reviewed by such people.
necovek 7y ago
Textbooks and research papers are an entirely separate topics, imho. While it's easy to argue for textbooks to be openly available (just like education should be), there is no single reason for research papers not to be, since they purportedly advance science and human kind itself, and there is the demand of originality (if I can't access it, I can't establish if someone has not done it already).

mschuetz 7y ago

arXiv is a nice idea but I kinda hate it. It's not compatible with overleaf for no good reason at all. arXiv expects you to ship the source of the article + some sort of generated bib file of a specific version, instead of generating the bib file from the source. As a result, arXiv will fail to host overleaf generated content if both happen to use different versions of tex at the time. But I'm submitting the entire source to arXiv, so there is no good reason for arXiv to fail to produce a pdf from it! Gave up on arXiv because of that. I use overleaf to avoid all the Latex issues, and I'm absolutely not interested in supporting something that expects me to get back to wasting time on fixing latex issues instead of producing content.

btrettel 7y ago
Yes, even though I don't use Overleaf, I had a similar problem caused by arXiv using an older version of biblatex than I do. (I think bibtex's file format has been more stable and might work.) Switching to TeX Live 2016 (the distribution that arXiv uses) on my end as I recall seemed to be more trouble than it's worth. Instead I used an alternative preprint website where I only had to upload a PDF file.
abhgh 7y ago
Just delete the .bib file. arXiv only needs the .bbl file. What is confusing is even if you have both the .bib and .bbl, arXiv doesn't ignore the former, it raises an error anyway. Bad error reporting. Another tip if you're using overleaf: make sure your bibliography related warnings that overleaf points out, are gone too. Overleaf is resilient to these but arXiv is not.
- mschuetz 7y ago
  I think the bbl file is what I meant. It's created from the source and bib file, and arXiv refuses to accept the one that is created by overleaf. I really dislike arXiv for demanding the full source and refusing pdfs, but then insisting you also provide a file that is generated from that source, but not accepting that file unless it's generated with specific builders.

qpiox 7y ago

Don't forget that arXiv is not recognized as a publisher of scientific work by nearly all universities, and you are only evaluated for papers published by well known venues.