5 ms·

Why viXra?

45 points by teleforce 3y ago

theamk 3y ago
I've looked at "Data Structures and Algorithms" section (https://vixra.org/dsalg/ https://vixra.org/dsalg/) as this is a topic I am familiar with.. it is very small, just 20 papers in 2023. Also, at least 4 of those (20%) are P=NP proofs, which is a great indicator of low quality. I honestly don't understand why people would submit their papers there. The reasons for using arxiv are two-fold: - It's a great way to prove the priority. Not only Cornell university have great reputation, but arxiv has mirrors and metadata feeds which can be used to detect the retroactive modification. Which means if you see an arxiv publication, you can be sure it's not backdated. - It's also some way to prove credentials. Paper appearing on arxiv means the author is likely affiliated with academic world, or at least knows someone from there. vixra has nothing like this. By design, it requires no credentials. It is also has no reputation, for all that we know the articles may be backdated all the time. If you want to prove priority, pretty much any other method would work better - twitter post, usenet post, github comment, even personal website added to wayback machine.
- hannob 3y ago
  Oh, vixra has a reputation. It's the favorite preprint server for pseudoscience. Want to publish anything about free energy, homeopathy, or your favorite personal theory why einstein and darwin were wrong? Vixra is your place to publish.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    It's pretty useful to have a high signal for cranks wherein the cranks themselves do the paperwork.
- dguest 3y ago
  I always assumed it was for exactly the reasons you list. Anyone with academic credentials can submit to arxiv, but that leaves out a huge group of non-academic hobby scientists who haven't had a spare 6 years to find their way into the ivory tower.
  - I_am_uncreative 3y ago
    But... You don't need academic credentials to submit to arXiv. Anyone can submit to it, and arXiv doesn't do peer review either, they just have a bare minimum amount of review to ensure you're not submitting things that clearly do not match reality.
    - mindcrime 3y ago
      > But... You don't need academic credentials to submit to arXiv. Well... sure, that's true in the strictest possible sense. But in practice, arXiv does do a measure of gatekeeping that's heavily based around academic affiliation as a criterion. It's just that it's possible with some effort to work around that and submit as someone who is outside of formal academia. Or at least they say it is[1]. I've never tried the process myself and I've heard mixed stories from others who have, about how (easy|hard) it is to get endorsed in such a case. arXiv requires that users be endorsed before submitting their first paper to a category. <snip> arXiv may give some people automatic endorsements based on subject area, topic, previous submissions, and academic affiliation. In most cases, automatic endorsement is given to authors from known academic institutions and research facilities. arXiv submitters are therefore encouraged to associate an institutional email address, if they have one, with their arXiv account (see author registration help). This will expedite the endorsement process. <snip> If you need to be endorsed by someone, it is best for you to find an endorser who you know personally and is knowledgeable in the subject area of your paper. A good choice for graduate students would be your thesis advisor or another professor in your department/institution working in your field. So yeah, you can see that their whole setup is really heavily oriented towards members of formal academia. That said, they do explicitly acknowledge the need to occasionally reach out and solicit endorsements from people you don't know. So I assume this does happen. Alternatively this is the recommended way to proceed. Start by finding related articles in your field. Your preprint surely has cited works that are already posted in the arXiv, some of these works will be particularly relevant. Bring up these abstracts from the arXiv page. You can find somebody qualified to endorse by clicking on the link titled "Which of these authors are endorsers?" at the bottom of every abstract page. Using that information, you can then find the email address of the submitter on the abstract page just under the "Submission history" heading. But, again, I've heard mixed stories from people who have tried. I can't help but think there ought to be some mechanism that's a little more deterministic, but while keeping the overall spirit of arXiv in place, and keeping cranks out. But I'll admit I don't know exactly what form that would take off the top of my head. [1]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html
- teleforce 3y ago
  Apparently arXiv, can reject paper after several weeks of submission even if you are an academic with no reasons given whatsoever. This perhaps due to some reasons but the fact that they can just reject any paper as they wished since they are the gatekeeper even without telling the authors the reason why, is very concerning. Perhaps due to the authors being first submitter to arXiv with no endorsement, but lack of feedback and several weeks delay just not professional on their part although it is probably a voluntary work though. In research a few weeks can affect the paper's originality tremendously. I once read that arXiv is everything good about science, remember Perelman published his groundbreaking here, but now I have my doubts [1]. I think this a good opportunity to have an automated AI based repository with proper timestamp, no backtracking and non-repudiattion features as an alternative to arXiv without human gatekeeper in place. The paper's authors can be charged a small fees for the submission to this new online research repository so that their originality of idea and contribution is timestamped properly. [1]The Non-Peer-Reviewed Proof That Won the Fields Medal: https://siddharthlabh.medium.com/the-non-peer-reviewed-proof-that-won-the-fields-medal-8a9683cb0f28 https://siddharthlabh.medium.com/the-non-peer-reviewed-proof...
doomrobo 3y ago
FWIW this seems to work in some fields. The standard preprint site for all cryptography is eprint.iacr.org, which has no requirement for institutional affiliation. And even so, I find the signal to noise ratio to be very high. Maybe it's the fact that it's niche, but idk
- hannob 3y ago
  eprint.iacr.org has no institutional requirement, but it does have minimal standards. It takes a few days for them to review. It's not a real peer review, but they check that you don't just publish gibberish or spam or something obviously wrong. (I have published there without an affiliation to a research institution.)
- llwu 3y ago
  Even if eprint.iacr.org did include the analogue of viXra's content (which I've heard it mostly doesn't, other than one time that famous cryptographer whose name I forgot got old and published a crank paper, which IIRC was quickly resolved), it would also include the analogue of arXiv's content, since it seems to be the leading pre-print server in that area. viXra by comparison is fighting an uphill battle since they get only the arXiv runoff. Making an inclusive venue that's actually worth publishing in would require attracting not only the runoff from other venues but also poach the best people from said venues. Inclusiveness in research is something I've always wanted to solve, but it seems really hard - if e.g. 10% of the incumbent elite are good and 1% of the outcasts are good (and the other 99% is mostly cranks), then the task is to get the respective 10% and 1% to mingle somehow without the rest. And I'm not even convinced arXiv has any inclusivity problem at all - it's more places like Nature that have inclusivity problems. viXra might be barking up the wrong tree.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mindcrime 3y ago
Other perfectly conventional e-prints will be found here simply because the authors were not able to find a suitable endorser for the arXiv or because they prefer a more open system. Unfortunately I expect that this has not turned out to be the case. Why? Because so many cranks and crackpots submit stuff to viXra that it has become known as - as said by a fellow HN'er in this thread - "the favorite preprint server for pseudoscience". Meaning viXra doesn't "not have a reputation" but rather it actually has a negative reputation. So if you're a serious researcher who happens to operate outside of formal academia, and you have something you want to share, you're actually better of not submitting to viXra. You should just post to your personal website and then share with Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Facebook, HN, whatever. You could also upload your paper to sites like academia.edu or ResearchGate which might help get it some visibility among academics.
okaleniuk 3y ago
Academic publishing has a lot of problems, it is an aging institution after all, and it shows. However, reputation-via-affiliation is the only thing that keeps it running.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

45 points by teleforce 3y ago

I've looked at "Data Structures and Algorithms" section (https://vixra.org/dsalg/ https://vixra.org/dsalg/) as this is a topic I am familiar with.. it is very small, just 20 papers in 2023. Also, at least 4 of those (20%) are P=NP proofs, which is a great indicator of low quality. I honestly don't understand why people would submit their papers there. The reasons for using arxiv are two-fold: - It's a great way to prove the priority. Not only Cornell university have great reputation, but arxiv has mirrors and metadata feeds which can be used to detect the retroactive modification. Which means if you see an arxiv publication, you can be sure it's not backdated. - It's also some way to prove credentials. Paper appearing on arxiv means the author is likely affiliated with academic world, or at least knows someone from there. vixra has nothing like this. By design, it requires no credentials. It is also has no reputation, for all that we know the articles may be backdated all the time. If you want to prove priority, pretty much any other method would work better - twitter post, usenet post, github comment, even personal website added to wayback machine.

hannob 3y ago
Oh, vixra has a reputation. It's the favorite preprint server for pseudoscience. Want to publish anything about free energy, homeopathy, or your favorite personal theory why einstein and darwin were wrong? Vixra is your place to publish.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  It's pretty useful to have a high signal for cranks wherein the cranks themselves do the paperwork.
dguest 3y ago
I always assumed it was for exactly the reasons you list. Anyone with academic credentials can submit to arxiv, but that leaves out a huge group of non-academic hobby scientists who haven't had a spare 6 years to find their way into the ivory tower.
- I_am_uncreative 3y ago
  But... You don't need academic credentials to submit to arXiv. Anyone can submit to it, and arXiv doesn't do peer review either, they just have a bare minimum amount of review to ensure you're not submitting things that clearly do not match reality.
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    > But... You don't need academic credentials to submit to arXiv. Well... sure, that's true in the strictest possible sense. But in practice, arXiv does do a measure of gatekeeping that's heavily based around academic affiliation as a criterion. It's just that it's possible with some effort to work around that and submit as someone who is outside of formal academia. Or at least they say it is[1]. I've never tried the process myself and I've heard mixed stories from others who have, about how (easy|hard) it is to get endorsed in such a case. arXiv requires that users be endorsed before submitting their first paper to a category. <snip> arXiv may give some people automatic endorsements based on subject area, topic, previous submissions, and academic affiliation. In most cases, automatic endorsement is given to authors from known academic institutions and research facilities. arXiv submitters are therefore encouraged to associate an institutional email address, if they have one, with their arXiv account (see author registration help). This will expedite the endorsement process. <snip> If you need to be endorsed by someone, it is best for you to find an endorser who you know personally and is knowledgeable in the subject area of your paper. A good choice for graduate students would be your thesis advisor or another professor in your department/institution working in your field. So yeah, you can see that their whole setup is really heavily oriented towards members of formal academia. That said, they do explicitly acknowledge the need to occasionally reach out and solicit endorsements from people you don't know. So I assume this does happen. Alternatively this is the recommended way to proceed. Start by finding related articles in your field. Your preprint surely has cited works that are already posted in the arXiv, some of these works will be particularly relevant. Bring up these abstracts from the arXiv page. You can find somebody qualified to endorse by clicking on the link titled "Which of these authors are endorsers?" at the bottom of every abstract page. Using that information, you can then find the email address of the submitter on the abstract page just under the "Submission history" heading. But, again, I've heard mixed stories from people who have tried. I can't help but think there ought to be some mechanism that's a little more deterministic, but while keeping the overall spirit of arXiv in place, and keeping cranks out. But I'll admit I don't know exactly what form that would take off the top of my head. [1]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html
teleforce 3y ago
Apparently arXiv, can reject paper after several weeks of submission even if you are an academic with no reasons given whatsoever. This perhaps due to some reasons but the fact that they can just reject any paper as they wished since they are the gatekeeper even without telling the authors the reason why, is very concerning. Perhaps due to the authors being first submitter to arXiv with no endorsement, but lack of feedback and several weeks delay just not professional on their part although it is probably a voluntary work though. In research a few weeks can affect the paper's originality tremendously. I once read that arXiv is everything good about science, remember Perelman published his groundbreaking here, but now I have my doubts [1]. I think this a good opportunity to have an automated AI based repository with proper timestamp, no backtracking and non-repudiattion features as an alternative to arXiv without human gatekeeper in place. The paper's authors can be charged a small fees for the submission to this new online research repository so that their originality of idea and contribution is timestamped properly. [1]The Non-Peer-Reviewed Proof That Won the Fields Medal: https://siddharthlabh.medium.com/the-non-peer-reviewed-proof-that-won-the-fields-medal-8a9683cb0f28 https://siddharthlabh.medium.com/the-non-peer-reviewed-proof...

doomrobo 3y ago

FWIW this seems to work in some fields. The standard preprint site for all cryptography is eprint.iacr.org, which has no requirement for institutional affiliation. And even so, I find the signal to noise ratio to be very high. Maybe it's the fact that it's niche, but idk

hannob 3y ago
eprint.iacr.org has no institutional requirement, but it does have minimal standards. It takes a few days for them to review. It's not a real peer review, but they check that you don't just publish gibberish or spam or something obviously wrong. (I have published there without an affiliation to a research institution.)
llwu 3y ago
Even if eprint.iacr.org did include the analogue of viXra's content (which I've heard it mostly doesn't, other than one time that famous cryptographer whose name I forgot got old and published a crank paper, which IIRC was quickly resolved), it would also include the analogue of arXiv's content, since it seems to be the leading pre-print server in that area. viXra by comparison is fighting an uphill battle since they get only the arXiv runoff. Making an inclusive venue that's actually worth publishing in would require attracting not only the runoff from other venues but also poach the best people from said venues. Inclusiveness in research is something I've always wanted to solve, but it seems really hard - if e.g. 10% of the incumbent elite are good and 1% of the outcasts are good (and the other 99% is mostly cranks), then the task is to get the respective 10% and 1% to mingle somehow without the rest. And I'm not even convinced arXiv has any inclusivity problem at all - it's more places like Nature that have inclusivity problems. viXra might be barking up the wrong tree.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mindcrime 3y ago

Other perfectly conventional e-prints will be found here simply because the authors were not able to find a suitable endorser for the arXiv or because they prefer a more open system. Unfortunately I expect that this has not turned out to be the case. Why? Because so many cranks and crackpots submit stuff to viXra that it has become known as - as said by a fellow HN'er in this thread - "the favorite preprint server for pseudoscience". Meaning viXra doesn't "not have a reputation" but rather it actually has a negative reputation. So if you're a serious researcher who happens to operate outside of formal academia, and you have something you want to share, you're actually better of not submitting to viXra. You should just post to your personal website and then share with Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Facebook, HN, whatever. You could also upload your paper to sites like academia.edu or ResearchGate which might help get it some visibility among academics.

okaleniuk 3y ago

Academic publishing has a lot of problems, it is an aging institution after all, and it shows. However, reputation-via-affiliation is the only thing that keeps it running.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]