4 ms·

It's a filter thing. Free platforms let anyone post anything without any filter. Clearly that results in a lot of rubbish being included. As the signal to noi

It's a filter thing. Free platforms let anyone post anything without any filter. Clearly that results in a lot of rubbish being included. As the signal to noise ratio increases the value of the platform decreases. I can publish anything I like on my blog, but my blog has no reputation compared to a million other blogs. Of course filtering is expensive, biased, sometimes wrong, limits access to information and so on. The current academic system is pretty "broken". But just making all articles free to post, free to read, isn't the solution. We have that already and it's terrible. (Facebook, YouTube et al.) Ultimately we still need filtering - and thats the hard problem that needs solving.

bjornsing 2y ago
Filtering should happen after publication, and be built into platforms like ArXiv.
- bruce511 2y ago
  I would suggest that it's hard to do that as an afterthought. If the internet has shown us anything it's that public curating of material seldom allows quality to float to the top. And when filtering, or curating, is exercised then the argument swings between "untrue" on one side and "censored" on the other. Simply saying "it should all be open" without acknowledging, or worse without understanding, the real harm that approach could bring is to bring an overly simplistic solution to a hard problem.
mharig 2y ago
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matwood 2y ago
> It's a filter thing. I'm reminded of this quote from Ben Thompson: In short, the analog world was defined by scarcity, which meant distribution of scarce goods was the locus of power; the digital world is defined by abundance, which means discovery of what you actually want to see is the locus of power. The result is that consumers have access to anything, which is to say that nothing is special; everything has been flattened. Instead of filter, I tend to say curate. There are so many papers being created no institution has the time to vet and curate. They want to use open access repositories and journals, but they don't want to bring hundreds of thousands unvetted papers and books into their local catalogs. There's also the prestige of certain journals, but like you touched on, at a meta level that's just curation. Citations and other scorings are attempts to address this issue, but those end up heavily weighted towards older publications that it's hard for new, possibly better research to bubble up.

bjornsing 2y ago

Filtering should happen after publication, and be built into platforms like ArXiv.

bruce511 2y ago
I would suggest that it's hard to do that as an afterthought. If the internet has shown us anything it's that public curating of material seldom allows quality to float to the top. And when filtering, or curating, is exercised then the argument swings between "untrue" on one side and "censored" on the other. Simply saying "it should all be open" without acknowledging, or worse without understanding, the real harm that approach could bring is to bring an overly simplistic solution to a hard problem.

mharig 2y ago

[dead]

matwood 2y ago

> It's a filter thing. I'm reminded of this quote from Ben Thompson: In short, the analog world was defined by scarcity, which meant distribution of scarce goods was the locus of power; the digital world is defined by abundance, which means discovery of what you actually want to see is the locus of power. The result is that consumers have access to anything, which is to say that nothing is special; everything has been flattened. Instead of filter, I tend to say curate. There are so many papers being created no institution has the time to vet and curate. They want to use open access repositories and journals, but they don't want to bring hundreds of thousands unvetted papers and books into their local catalogs. There's also the prestige of certain journals, but like you touched on, at a meta level that's just curation. Citations and other scorings are attempts to address this issue, but those end up heavily weighted towards older publications that it's hard for new, possibly better research to bubble up.