6 ms·

I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https:

I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials which is chump change.

thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
I also don't understand how there can so much money to throw at startups and not one person to "adpot-a-highway" for a year.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Much of the money for startups comes ultimately from pension funds. They have a fiduciary duty to make sure the money is invested in something that is expected to make a return.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  Because you cannot rely on the rich to fund common goods through voluntary donations. It is not a good idea and never will be. Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    Has any social ill been eliminated by any other means?
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    The introductory econ course I once took mentioned the (apparently classic) lighthouse study[1], though now that I did a web search it doesn’t seem that unequivocal. Many 19th century projects were funded through public participation (the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty come to mind), even if the social value of some of them was questionable (though I think some railroads were built this way too?). Before that, I seem to remember that the Netherlands was made habitable (from essentially a coastal swamp) largely through private enterprise. In more recent times, the late engineer turned entrepreneur Dmitrij Zimin funded a significant portion of the Russian hard sciences in the 2000s and 2010s (after Soros grants got some of the people through the Soviet collapse in the 1990s and then ceased), though the problem is still far from solved. It is peculiar that the model of fundraising via newspaper ads and a couple of wealthy donors (including in some cases the national government, yes) doesn’t seem to have survived past the world wars, but to say that private funding never resulted in any social good is preposterous. Something has happened in the last century or so, but it’s trickier than that. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/724895 https://www.jstor.org/stable/724895
    - consp 5y ago
      > largely through private enterprise Calling a hoogheemraadschap a private enterprise is calling a government one. If it acts like a government it is one even if it is not benefitting everyone equally (still no difference though).
      - eecc 5y ago
        Isn’t it essentially a Corporation in its original definition where they were established for a given purpose (not just “maximize shareholder value” but rather something like “build and maintain some infrastructure” or whatnot)
    - telxosser 5y ago
      You can just visit Pittsburgh to see how preposterous this is. The city is practically unimaginable culturally without Andrew Carnegie's wealth.
  - WHA8m 5y ago
    Discard the last sentence. You're talking in absolute terms and that's leading nowhere. It's been some time, but this is what came to my mind immediately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei That you can not rely on the rich to put their money in good use with the general public in mind is right. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? Definitely not.
    - astrange 5y ago
      The anti-charity people get around their absolutism by inventing "mutual aid", which is what they call charity when they like it. (similar thing in education involved deciding "equality" was bad, so they invented "equity", which is the same thing except they like it.)
      - demygale 5y ago
        Mutual aid is decentralized charity, the aid comes from the community instead of a NGO.
        astrange 5y ago
        I don't think normal people define "charity" only to mean "charity that doesn't work" though. Giving to a local food bank is charity to most people. And, like, GiveWell/GiveDirectly are NGOs that are actually effective.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
      Right! And that’s really my point–there are so many people in tech with money and an ego that I’m surprised this isn’t done more. Pineapple person in the most recent memorable example.
      - WHA8m 5y ago
        Yes, I think we're on the same page here. Your main point was, that you can not rely on the rich to use their money to benefit others and I totally agree.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
    A lot very confident statements there. > Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill. This is very broad and incorrect statement that I suggest you research more before stating as fact. Maybe start with libraries in the 19th and 20th century if you don’t know where to start.
manquer 5y ago
Arxiv is a indirect threat to publications. Publications lobby the government and also influence university grants and other bodies. We still don't have a proper open /free tax filing too from the IRS or tax computed by IRS only for us to verify/confirm as in some of other countries, primarily because intuit (and others) lobbied to make sure the government would never develop one (encoded in law no less), so it is not that surprising that a community benefiting project that threatens some big business revenues has no government funding available.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Arxiv is a indirect threat to publications. It's incredibly annoying that publications try to continue to exist in order to act as a gatekeeper to exclusive papers. If journals added real value by peer-reviewing, collating, curating, offering editorial opinion etc then the fact papers are also available in the raw state somewhere else wouldn't much of a threat.
  - manquer 5y ago
    You don't need publications of course, both are competing to own a social network and derive their strength from users that is the threat. An online ecosystem like Arxiv can very easily supersede a journal if they want to. For example Arxiv say could deploy a public peer review process i.e. reviews, criticisms and comments on the paper could be available next to paper in Arxiv without a lot of effort technically. Similarly curation and collation could easily taken up for free by community. Any of this would upend journals in quality or throughput easily. There are no problems journals solve that online cannot do better not even exclusivity they charge so much for. After all there are enough people to moderate reddit or do various quality control tasks in StackOverflow for not much benefit, researchers who curate on Arxiv could easily be found and they may even get a job boost. Building that community and acceptance is the hard part everything else is relatively trival. -- Open Access especially for government funded research should be mandatory. Same for software, any thing government invests to develop should be open source.
IAmEveryone 5y ago
If you mean some government should fund arXiv, specifically, then I don't disagree but would guess the government's default position of "it exists without public money, and we think that's rather excellent". If you're suggesting it as alternative for academic publishing in general, it would cost a lot more. Arxiv isn't a "publication platform" in the sense that peer-reviewed journals are. The cost of hosting and distributing PDFs is close to zero, obviously. What does cost money is the copyediting and running the peer review process. People think Elsevier are the worst people in the world (not entirely wrong) and taking in millions while exploiting the free labor of authors and reviewers. But it's relatively easy to quantify the value they do add: their financials are public and, last I checked, they have operating margins of about 30 %. Let's say we could do without their marketing and billing departments and that gets us to a margin of 50 %. That's pretty good, but it isn't quite the rip-off people sometimes suggest it is. Replacing the commercial publishers with government-funded open-access journals would be a billion-dollar endeavor, not a few million for servers and a bit of software.
- eru 5y ago
  Perhaps it's best for governments not to get involved in arxiv. They are heavily involved in most other aspects of academia, and the results haven't been universally pretty.
- erwincoumans 5y ago
  Interestingly, the peers doing the hard work (of actual reviewing) for free. Running the reviewing process can also happen through https://openreview.net https://openreview.net Not sure why we need Elsevier exactly, could you be more specific?
tsbischof 5y ago
Part of the challenge is the reputation issue. Academics want to publish where there is prestige, which means there has to be a perception of the venue as good. This typically either comes from reasonable gatekeeping and high-quality peers (e.g. arXiv) or pushing metrics (e.g. Nature Publishing Group journals). Generating an attractive journal is non-trivial and few people with the appropriate knowledge and expertise take the plunge would do so without some guarantee of profit.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  > Academics want to publish where there is prestige Important to note that this is not some innate "want"; their careers depend on it. It's a means to an ends, the ends being being able to keep practicing science. (Of course prestige-by-proxy will play a role as well, but it's not what's keeping the system in place.)
mananaysiempre 5y ago
Funding for government-funded archival projects tends to begin with a bang but gradually fall through the cracks due to the project becoming politically unexciting, frequently with all data just completely lost one day with no warning, so I’d be disinclined to trust any such initiative. The French government made an attempt with HAL[1], but given how INRIA just unceremoniously deleted the software repository Gforge with no backups or redirects (and broke every GCC build out there, because the GCC dependency ISL was hosted on it[2]), I’m not sure it’ll survive once the nationalistic fervor is exhausted. Besides, a country-specific repository seems to be strictly worse than a country-neutral one. On the other hand, PubMed exists. My guess is, for a preprint archive, network effects are paramount, and ArXiv was there first. It’s not directly a government project, but is still funded by US government grants and hosted by Stanford (now that the international mirror network is shut down, which does give me a slightly jittery feeling). [1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ [2] https://groups.google.com/g/isl-development/c/JGaMo2VUu_8 https://groups.google.com/g/isl-development/c/JGaMo2VUu_8
- goodcanadian 5y ago
  The Canadian Astronomy Data Centre is a good counter example of a successful government funded archival project: https://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/en/ https://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/en/ It probably helps that it is run under the auspices of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics.
lN5uhiNxWPBi 5y ago
There is, right? In many cases around the world. Here in the UK, there is a big research evaluation exercise called the REF. The REF is important because it largely determines how the government allocates funds. In order to be eligible to be evaluated, researchers have to essentially submit their pre-prints into open access. What this has meant for the last 10+ years is that most universities participating in the REF have an e-prints server, like the arxiv. Obviously, being publically funded, universities are then using government money to pay for these costs. Now your question might be whether it's sensible for the entire country (or research councils) to operate their own e-prints server. I don't know the answer to this. All I know is that the more bureaucracy you involve, the more bullshit results.

thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago

I also don't understand how there can so much money to throw at startups and not one person to "adpot-a-highway" for a year.

zarzavat 5y ago
Much of the money for startups comes ultimately from pension funds. They have a fiduciary duty to make sure the money is invested in something that is expected to make a return.
ahelwer 5y ago
Because you cannot rely on the rich to fund common goods through voluntary donations. It is not a good idea and never will be. Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill.
- leephillips 5y ago
  Has any social ill been eliminated by any other means?
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  The introductory econ course I once took mentioned the (apparently classic) lighthouse study[1], though now that I did a web search it doesn’t seem that unequivocal. Many 19th century projects were funded through public participation (the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty come to mind), even if the social value of some of them was questionable (though I think some railroads were built this way too?). Before that, I seem to remember that the Netherlands was made habitable (from essentially a coastal swamp) largely through private enterprise. In more recent times, the late engineer turned entrepreneur Dmitrij Zimin funded a significant portion of the Russian hard sciences in the 2000s and 2010s (after Soros grants got some of the people through the Soviet collapse in the 1990s and then ceased), though the problem is still far from solved. It is peculiar that the model of fundraising via newspaper ads and a couple of wealthy donors (including in some cases the national government, yes) doesn’t seem to have survived past the world wars, but to say that private funding never resulted in any social good is preposterous. Something has happened in the last century or so, but it’s trickier than that. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/724895 https://www.jstor.org/stable/724895
  - consp 5y ago
    > largely through private enterprise Calling a hoogheemraadschap a private enterprise is calling a government one. If it acts like a government it is one even if it is not benefitting everyone equally (still no difference though).
    - eecc 5y ago
      Isn’t it essentially a Corporation in its original definition where they were established for a given purpose (not just “maximize shareholder value” but rather something like “build and maintain some infrastructure” or whatnot)
  - telxosser 5y ago
    You can just visit Pittsburgh to see how preposterous this is. The city is practically unimaginable culturally without Andrew Carnegie's wealth.
- WHA8m 5y ago
  Discard the last sentence. You're talking in absolute terms and that's leading nowhere. It's been some time, but this is what came to my mind immediately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei That you can not rely on the rich to put their money in good use with the general public in mind is right. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? Definitely not.
  - astrange 5y ago
    The anti-charity people get around their absolutism by inventing "mutual aid", which is what they call charity when they like it. (similar thing in education involved deciding "equality" was bad, so they invented "equity", which is the same thing except they like it.)
    - demygale 5y ago
      Mutual aid is decentralized charity, the aid comes from the community instead of a NGO.
      - astrange 5y ago
        I don't think normal people define "charity" only to mean "charity that doesn't work" though. Giving to a local food bank is charity to most people. And, like, GiveWell/GiveDirectly are NGOs that are actually effective.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
    Right! And that’s really my point–there are so many people in tech with money and an ego that I’m surprised this isn’t done more. Pineapple person in the most recent memorable example.
    - WHA8m 5y ago
      Yes, I think we're on the same page here. Your main point was, that you can not rely on the rich to use their money to benefit others and I totally agree.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
  A lot very confident statements there. > Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill. This is very broad and incorrect statement that I suggest you research more before stating as fact. Maybe start with libraries in the 19th and 20th century if you don’t know where to start.

manquer 5y ago

Arxiv is a indirect threat to publications. Publications lobby the government and also influence university grants and other bodies. We still don't have a proper open /free tax filing too from the IRS or tax computed by IRS only for us to verify/confirm as in some of other countries, primarily because intuit (and others) lobbied to make sure the government would never develop one (encoded in law no less), so it is not that surprising that a community benefiting project that threatens some big business revenues has no government funding available.

onion2k 5y ago
Arxiv is a indirect threat to publications. It's incredibly annoying that publications try to continue to exist in order to act as a gatekeeper to exclusive papers. If journals added real value by peer-reviewing, collating, curating, offering editorial opinion etc then the fact papers are also available in the raw state somewhere else wouldn't much of a threat.
- manquer 5y ago
  You don't need publications of course, both are competing to own a social network and derive their strength from users that is the threat. An online ecosystem like Arxiv can very easily supersede a journal if they want to. For example Arxiv say could deploy a public peer review process i.e. reviews, criticisms and comments on the paper could be available next to paper in Arxiv without a lot of effort technically. Similarly curation and collation could easily taken up for free by community. Any of this would upend journals in quality or throughput easily. There are no problems journals solve that online cannot do better not even exclusivity they charge so much for. After all there are enough people to moderate reddit or do various quality control tasks in StackOverflow for not much benefit, researchers who curate on Arxiv could easily be found and they may even get a job boost. Building that community and acceptance is the hard part everything else is relatively trival. -- Open Access especially for government funded research should be mandatory. Same for software, any thing government invests to develop should be open source.

IAmEveryone 5y ago

If you mean some government should fund arXiv, specifically, then I don't disagree but would guess the government's default position of "it exists without public money, and we think that's rather excellent". If you're suggesting it as alternative for academic publishing in general, it would cost a lot more. Arxiv isn't a "publication platform" in the sense that peer-reviewed journals are. The cost of hosting and distributing PDFs is close to zero, obviously. What does cost money is the copyediting and running the peer review process. People think Elsevier are the worst people in the world (not entirely wrong) and taking in millions while exploiting the free labor of authors and reviewers. But it's relatively easy to quantify the value they do add: their financials are public and, last I checked, they have operating margins of about 30 %. Let's say we could do without their marketing and billing departments and that gets us to a margin of 50 %. That's pretty good, but it isn't quite the rip-off people sometimes suggest it is. Replacing the commercial publishers with government-funded open-access journals would be a billion-dollar endeavor, not a few million for servers and a bit of software.

eru 5y ago
Perhaps it's best for governments not to get involved in arxiv. They are heavily involved in most other aspects of academia, and the results haven't been universally pretty.
erwincoumans 5y ago
Interestingly, the peers doing the hard work (of actual reviewing) for free. Running the reviewing process can also happen through https://openreview.net https://openreview.net Not sure why we need Elsevier exactly, could you be more specific?

tsbischof 5y ago

Part of the challenge is the reputation issue. Academics want to publish where there is prestige, which means there has to be a perception of the venue as good. This typically either comes from reasonable gatekeeping and high-quality peers (e.g. arXiv) or pushing metrics (e.g. Nature Publishing Group journals). Generating an attractive journal is non-trivial and few people with the appropriate knowledge and expertise take the plunge would do so without some guarantee of profit.

Vinnl 5y ago
> Academics want to publish where there is prestige Important to note that this is not some innate "want"; their careers depend on it. It's a means to an ends, the ends being being able to keep practicing science. (Of course prestige-by-proxy will play a role as well, but it's not what's keeping the system in place.)

mananaysiempre 5y ago

Funding for government-funded archival projects tends to begin with a bang but gradually fall through the cracks due to the project becoming politically unexciting, frequently with all data just completely lost one day with no warning, so I’d be disinclined to trust any such initiative. The French government made an attempt with HAL[1], but given how INRIA just unceremoniously deleted the software repository Gforge with no backups or redirects (and broke every GCC build out there, because the GCC dependency ISL was hosted on it[2]), I’m not sure it’ll survive once the nationalistic fervor is exhausted. Besides, a country-specific repository seems to be strictly worse than a country-neutral one. On the other hand, PubMed exists. My guess is, for a preprint archive, network effects are paramount, and ArXiv was there first. It’s not directly a government project, but is still funded by US government grants and hosted by Stanford (now that the international mirror network is shut down, which does give me a slightly jittery feeling). [1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ [2] https://groups.google.com/g/isl-development/c/JGaMo2VUu_8 https://groups.google.com/g/isl-development/c/JGaMo2VUu_8

goodcanadian 5y ago
The Canadian Astronomy Data Centre is a good counter example of a successful government funded archival project: https://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/en/ https://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/en/ It probably helps that it is run under the auspices of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics.

lN5uhiNxWPBi 5y ago

There is, right? In many cases around the world. Here in the UK, there is a big research evaluation exercise called the REF. The REF is important because it largely determines how the government allocates funds. In order to be eligible to be evaluated, researchers have to essentially submit their pre-prints into open access. What this has meant for the last 10+ years is that most universities participating in the REF have an e-prints server, like the arxiv. Obviously, being publically funded, universities are then using government money to pay for these costs. Now your question might be whether it's sensible for the entire country (or research councils) to operate their own e-prints server. I don't know the answer to this. All I know is that the more bureaucracy you involve, the more bullshit results.