4 ms·
The sooner academic publishers die the better—not a very original thought, I'm aware. There's still very much a distinction between (self-)publishing on the ar
by p0llard 7y ago
The sooner academic publishers die the better—not a very original thought, I'm aware.
There's still very much a distinction between (self-)publishing on the arXiv and publishing in a 'real' journal/conference within the academic community, and I think it comes down to two factors:
1. The arXiv moderation process has a much lower bar; you see some pretty rubbish papers (often from large tech companies) make their way onto the arXiv which would never be published in a 'real' journal; ultimately this isn't a shortcoming (the arXiv has had a monumental impact on academia), but rather that the arXiv isn't trying to be a peer-reviewed journal.
2. Visibility/'impact' is lower on the arXiv; there are ~14k submissions per month, so inevitably the signal to noise ratio is low.
I feel what we really need is for a few universities to put the many millions they spend on annual subscriptions into some kind of endowment to pay for proper editorial boards for a peer-reviewed arXiv instead, open access, perhaps with a token fee for submission (or a slightly higher academic affiliation bar). I think if two or three big universities from each of the US/UK/Europe suddenly made this change we would see the death of academic publishing in months.
- xvilka 7y agoJust an arXiv with peer-review is not enough. There is a lot of room for innovation and improvement. There was quite an interesting discussion[1] about creating something in between Overleaf[2], ArXiv[3], Git, and Wikipedia, moreover with the ability to do a peer-to-peer review, discussion, and social networking. Check out the last[4] article in that series. There are a few implementations, albeit not covering all features, like Authorea[5] and MIT's PubPub[6] (it is the open source[7]). See also GitXiv[8]. See also the Publishing Reform[9] project. Moreover, there is quite an interesting initiative from DARPA, to create the scientific social network of a kind - Polyplexus[10]. [1] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxiv/ http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi... [2] https://www.overleaf.com/ https://www.overleaf.com/ [3] https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/ [4] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-up-a-path-to-forkable-papers/ http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-up-a-... [5] https://authorea.com/ https://authorea.com/ [6] https://www.pubpub.org/ https://www.pubpub.org/ [7] https://github.com/pubpub https://github.com/pubpub [8] https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer-science-e5fea734cd45 https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer... [9] https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion [10] https://polyplexus.com/ https://polyplexus.com/
- shuhari 7y agoI will probably create a Show HN thread very soon to officially announce it, but I am creating a startup that aims to cover these areas. Essentially it's 'Reddit + Patreon for research'. http://asone.ai/ http://asone.ai/
- wiggler00m 7y agoWhat is your business model?
- shuhari 7y agoWe plan to take a cut of the crowdfunded transactions, like Patreon or Kickstarter does. We could also show academia-relevant ads on the sidebar. We will never paywall content on our platform.
- sundarurfriend 7y agoWhy is it on a ".ai" domain suffix?
- shuhari 7y agoThe other ones were taken. :(
- iceIX 7y agoThis covers a lot of what we're building at OpenReview.net. Obviously we still long way to go, but we already have some of the major AI/ML conferences using our platform to accept submissions, perform paper matching, and host peer-review forums.
- mseri 7y agoThere are experiments also in terms of peer reviewed open access journals that work as arxiv overlays. In mathematics we have discrete analysis [1] and sigma [2] (at least) which are quite good. Some journals started moving to a fully free open access model, e.g. JEP [3], Documenta Mathematica [4], Acta Mathematica [5] and Annales IF [6] (again at least). I agree with @xvilka that there is lots of room for innovation and exploration, but even in the more traditional setting there is some movement coming from the smaller realities. It seems to me that the big publisher monopoly, which at least in my field is completely unjustified, is the bigger obstacle. [1] https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ [2] https://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/ https://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/ [3] https://jep.math.cnrs.fr/index.php/JEP/ https://jep.math.cnrs.fr/index.php/JEP/ [4] https://www.elibm.org/series?q=se:2204 https://www.elibm.org/series?q=se:2204 [5] https://intlpress.com/index.php https://intlpress.com/index.php [6] https://aif.centre-mersenne.org/ https://aif.centre-mersenne.org/
- wdobbels 7y agoAt least in astrophysics, the standard is to let your paper go through peer review first, then post the paper once accepted. In the arXiv comments, you then put "Accepted by <journal>". Besides offering the papers for free, the arXiv is the main "news feed" that astronomers use (much more convenient than having to check all the different journals). Imo this system works quite well. There's indeed papers posted that are not yet peer-reviewed, but these you read with a more skeptical view. The large number of submissions is indeed a problem for other fields (I think mostly computer science?). I'm not sure what the best solution is for that. A voting system (where you see a mix of new and popular submissions), together with some content filtering, can help the reader. However, this would probably lead to some important papers getting burried.
- pergadad 7y agoI'm not convinced they are fully useless. Eg even an anti-vax person will understand that academic publishing has some solidness, even if they think it's'the establishment'. Explaining to a layman what arxiv does and how solid or not solid science on the site is is a lot more difficult.