All research and code posted on them gets a quick once-over; good work gets the attention it deserves; bad work is quickly ignored. Reviews take place over the Internet via both public and private forums.
Gatekeeping power lies more and more in the hands of a global, distributed scientific community open to anyone willing and capable of doing and reviewing the work. It's fabulous IMHO.
What is the basis for all these claims? Who is giving it the quick once-over?
Crowd-sourced review and information, despite some strengths and high initial hopes, has a record of extraordinary misinformation and disinformation. Why would we want to use that system for scientific research?
I prefer careful peer review, standards for announcing funders, etc.
arXiv has 200 expert moderators spread through different fields to filter out papers that are blatantly misleading, unoriginal, non-substantive, or in need of significant review and revision. It's not a peer-review, but it's not a complete free-for-all either.
I'm not sure I'd go that far with the optimism, at least in my field (artificial intelligence). Some obviously bad work does immediately fade into obscurity, and better work probably does on average get more attention, but the variation is huge. There is so much stuff on arXiv, that to get attention you need some kind of PR push so people notice it in the firehose, or a dice-roll around a viral tweet or science journalist noticing it. Some of the better funded university and corporate research groups have actual professional PR and science-comm teams doing coordinated social-media blitzes, press releases, and blog posts around new arXiv papers! That's a huge factor in determining whether a given paper gets attention.
does arxiv show who reviewed it? credentials etc?
Is there a trust scoring mechanism or some such?
is there some way to show a graph of reviewing?
Is there a restriction on who can post a paper?
(I'm not saying any of these are needed to make it "respectable" or even that they should be... just wondering how arxiv does its thing)
Personally I like the overall concept of arxiv. Even with no one necessarily reviewing a paper, which is probably unlikely, the fact its even accessible for later review when necessary is worthwhile.
It would add the ability for people to state that they have reviewed a given work. Might not be the direction they want to go in, or it might not be - but so far I'm not even sure if someone's seen it, unfortunately.
For submitting you need to be approved by someone who already has several submissions in that field.
Finally. ( = Let us devise it for the publications, then let us export it to the many, uttermostly crucial, contexts that can use it).
That said: in the legal world, where PACER extracts $0.10 per "page" even now that you get things electronically and the cost is near zero:
There's a service RECAP (PACER spelled backwards), where you can install a browser extension which automatically copies anything you download from PACER to a free archive. So one person pays, and the rest get it free.
It is amazingly complete, much more than you would think. For instance, here's the entry for the Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) trial:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7185174/united-states-v...
But a quick search reveals that this is in fact a government-provided service. So your government charges you 10 cents per page to download PDFs from a glorified file server.
The US has around 1.5M people working in the legal field. Let's say each of them does 10 document lookups every day. 15 million requests in an 8 hour workday comes out to 500 requests per second. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure a modern workstation could handle that, let alone a dedicated server or ever a few of them with good caching and client-side load balancing. SCOTUS spends 16M yearly just on building maintenance, I think it's safe to assume they can afford a handful of servers without having to resort to microtransactions...
Typically such revenue streams cover other holes in the budget not related to this service as well, and there is indirect overhead costs like Contracts, control structures, HR, vendors etc harder to amortize.
Any costs for what should be free public access in not right. The argument should be that we pay already tax, this information public should have free and easily .
Listen to me, HN. Stop listening to this meme. You aren't using your brains.
Everyone has a hard-on for Elsevier, and no other publisher. Why is that? Because they don't know anything about publishing. They've just heard the name Elsevier (and it kind of looks evil) and so they just parrot it ad-nauseam. What about Springer? Taylor & Francis? Wiley-Blackwell? And what about the hundreds of smaller publishers that control major journals? Everyone gives Elsevier shit about suing Sci-Hub, but nobody gives the American Chemical Society shit for suing Sci-Hub. The fact is that people only hold up Elsevier as the great evil because people are tying to over-simplify a complex problem by finding a "single evil", because then they don't have to think about a more complex, nuanced problem.
The fact is that there is a reason that paid journals keep existing, and it's not the profit margins of the Big Four. It's the academic research industry. Every single academic research institute in the world that publishes papers depends on the reputation of journals. Getting your paper published in a "prestigious journal" is literally the only way to progress a researcher's career, and thus get more funding. Without funding, there is no research! And the journals are providing real due diligence happening in the process of creating those journals, and somebody has to pay for that process.
If the paid journals went away tomorrow, researchers would be fucked, and academic institutions would have no idea what to do with themselves. So please stop with this ridiculous meme that Elsevier is The Great Satan holding back science. Sure, they should profit a lot less! But getting rid of them entirely with no system to replace them will be destructive to scientific research.
I co-authored a peer reviewed paper. Because our English is bad and our context is different, we called a system operating at 100Hz a "high frequency sensor" instead of a "fast sample rate (context) sensor". They gave that paper to an HF (radio) engineer to review it. He said "I think I was given this paper by mistake, this is not HF. Anyway, nice paper, change the color of this graph please."
Pair that with the general replication problem (no one has the money, time or incentive to replicate anything), that publish or perish mentality, the idiotic bias against publishing negative results - jeez, the situation is baaad.
I don't think your fundamental thesis of "only Elsevier is blamed" holds up to the post you replied to.
Both things can be true. They can be providing valuable due diligence and also sucking a lot of value (much of it funded by public/taxpayer money) along the way.
Your position seems to be that impact factors and bibliometrics are crucial to the progress of science. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The paid journals take research which is mostly paid for with public or non-profit money, and hide it behind paywalls. You can't avoid this fact.
Their "reputation" is mostly just a legacy, like the New York Times'. At one time they sent out paper journals, which was the only way information could be disseminated, and charged libraries reasonable fees. There was a manageable number of such journals so a library could get most or all of them. That world is gone.
Public repositories like arxiv or biorxiv are free.
As a practicing scientist, I ostensibly have access to a rich variety of journals from my employer. However, I've found journal access to be difficult during WFH/COVID. My default is to look for an open access paper, before jumping to the digital library. I've also had a few cases where the digital access seemed not to be working, which only put up barriers to my work.
In similar vein, software used by public institutions should be required to be made open-source. Open source is already the VIIth marvel of humanity, and needs consolidation.
Especially when you take into account that in other economies (outside the USA), their prices can be downright show-stoppers.
But then, it isn't particularly a new thing for larger economies to abuse standards and intellectual property regulations, to "compete" with smaller economies in ways that diametrically oppose the supposed (or at least often hailed) purpose and goals of both standards and intellectual property regulations.
Of course if the money does not come from ISO selling documents, it would need to come from tax revenue. In reality however it was scheduled the real money comes from the richest countries, as they're most able to afford it, your politicians may have the opinion that even a modest sum expended in this way would be justified by their opponents as profligate...
Funding announcement: https://www.ukri.org/news/funding-agreed-for-a-platform-that...
Yes, Ms. Price, that is the point.
The obvious global benefits may also be driving cooperation and sharing in other fields, including (and perhaps especially) publishing. Closed data has no beneficiaries except commerce - it's being seen as a dead model. Finally.
But down the road I can see that academic research publication will become like Facebook - loaded with bullshit promoted by hypesters - wasting time and killing thousands - and no one to enforce sanity in that lunatic wilderness!
If the 19th century journals would get with a program they would become science repos with a much smaller stuff and light fees (enough to support one staff managing editor per journal) for the review process! Publishing a paper in this model should probably cost about $1000 - $2,000, about the same as it cost the last time I was in academia...
On top of that I believe that non-scientific publishers have also been part of the lobby campaign as they see OA as weakening copyright.
There is some pressure to both make research not paywalled (Plan S is the strongest) and less costly. However, given that most of the funders' researchers can access most relevant research (albeit rather clumsily, thanks to the access mechanisms, and not 100%, hence Sci-Hub even being popular among those who do have access), and that the extracted rent on the scale of a country budget isn't that much, the pressure isn't particularly strong. Additionally, it's hard for a single funder/country to move on its own without ruining their academics' careers (hence Plan S's focus on signing on more funders).
You can usually find a pre-print by Googling the title.
Or ask the author for a copy.
(You shouldn't have to do this, but you can until all papers are open access anyway.)
Wiktionary notes it's customary in legal case notes, but gives no other usage, which I suppose supports it being a first for me.
It sounds good but has become hopelessly corrupted in many fields. Cronyism ("I'll pass your paper if you pass mine"), conformity ("This isn't what the Cool Kids have agreed to, so you can't publish it") and also "This is too readable. Needs more jargon!" have taken over. Does this mean it should be thrown out altogether, or just reformed? I'm not sure.
I was a tech assistant in Google Patent Litigation. Part of my job was to bust patents (a dream job, right?), and for that, I would scour the Internet for literature to invalidate a patent being asserted against us.
I would constantly see articles behind some paywall, and I would never, never click through. There are reasons you can imagine, like (1) I didn't want the hassle of justifying the expense, and (2) I hate those publishers. Both true.
However, the biggest reason was:
I don't know if it's any good until I read it.
The vast majority of articles are not helpful for my purpose. I can't tell if they really are until I read them. If it turns out that some article is the killer, then of course Google would pay for it. But for the 1000's that are not -- well, why waste the money? I can almost always find the same information somewhere else, for free.
Do peer reviewed papers make the reviewers public?
That would be an interesting angle if not. Allow anyone to publish, but they compete for high-status reviewers. Also, the reviewers have some skin in the game so far as correctness.
yeah, that kind of free huh. Sick.
> But starting in April 2022, that yearlong delay will no longer be permitted: Researchers choosing green open access must deposit the paper immediately when it is published.
