I always struggle to figure out what role arXiv should play in my information diet. On the one hand I support Open Access research. On the other hand, peer review is vital, and a substantial quantity of “papers” on arXiv are just blog posts in a LaTeX trench coat.
If you know the authors of your specific area of research, arXiv is a nice way to read their new papers when they are (mostly) done but the submission to a journal is not finished yet.
Do people browse arxiv or monitor new posts like reddit or something? I only visit when I encounter a link to it or when I search for a specific paper.
Yeah, it is not too uncommon that people visit the new listings (or subscribe to the email version) to (try to) keep track of what is going on in your field.
Supposing of course your field roughly matches one of the categories.
A bit too big and varied to browse, but you can get emails of all recent papers in your field(s) of interest with something like Scholars: https://app.scholars.io/newsletter I subscribe to "Functional Analysis" and get a weekly email listing 30-40 papers.
Peer review WAS vital for a long time. Maybe the world looks different now, maybe LLMs can find value in things better than humans. When you make an assumption it's good to think about why you do so, in this case it seems to be for historical reasons.
I really like the idea. In short: arXiv, HAL and similar sites host the papers without any peer review (short of perhaps stopping crank spam) or access control. They're freely available to anyone. Authors then submit arXiv IDs (or similar) to the reviewers of "overlay journals", which then review and accept or not. The overlay journal accepts a paper by just adding it to its list of accepted arXiv identifiers, and that's that.
This ensures accessibility for all, keeps peer review, yet takes a lot of the practical hurdles away from actually running a journal. A journal can now just be a group of people who give thumbs up or down to arXiv identifiers, and if that group's conclusion start having weight in the community then it's become an important journal. Maybe they give away their listings for free, maybe they charge to read the reviews – it's really up to them what the business model (if any) will be.
Of course some blog posts are worth citing. Then cite them as blog posts.
My point is that a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status. An unreviewed argument starts to look like established research merely because it adopts the visual grammar of a paper.
My point is it's still useful to have a somewhat authoritative place to cite (high quality) blog post level content. arXiv has formatting requirements and doesn't go down like random personal sites.
> a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status
True to a certain extent, although something people are aware of and they can judge the content themselves (hopefully).
Actually arXiv is frustrating from an open access angel. It is very much possible to put up documents without open licensing so the content is not always fulfilling the open access definition.
It is also valuable for scientists as it is often a 'directors cut' version of the paper. Journal submissions are heavy edited and shortened to fit into the page limits.
look at essentially any proceedings of any conference (in crypto we dont really do journals). see EUROCRYPT for example https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-91098-2 in there, every paper will be cut down and referring to full version for proofs etc. which are typically on eprint.iacr.org
We usually do conferences in cryptography/security, and most of them have page limits: CCS, USENIX, NDSS, S&P, CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT all have page limits (some allow appendices, which reviewers are not obligated to read).
exactly, the only reason Mozilla exists today is as a legal shield against an anti-browser monopoly suit against Google. that's the product they sell, and Google is paying hundreds of millions per year for this valuable service
Papers submitted to arXiv under its most permissive license should always be free, as in beer, speech, freedom. For researchers that contribute to it, that is the intention for a reason. It is to serve public and corporate good without restriction.
This isn't me siding with AI companies by the way; it's a slippery slope argument.
ArXiv is a good complement to the modern peer review, IMO. As long as someone "vouches" for you, and you adhere to its minimal standards, you're able to post a paper. Other readers can decide whether the paper is worth their attention, and whether the presented ideas or results are valuable.
It's also good that it doesn't gatekeep with the paywalls that you can pretty much only afford by affiliating yourself with a toll-paying institution.
Obviously, there are plenty of flaws with this system:
1. If you're associated with a brand (e.g., Google, MIT) or have a recognizable co-author (e.g., Yann LeCun), you'll get attention and citations no matter what.
2. "Vouching" can also just mean accepting someone's email request without ever having met or known them.
3. It puts the effort on the readers to decide whether each paper is valuable, and particularly scientifically valuable, for which most readers will be unequipped.
4. "Minimal standards" can be gamed by AI-generated submissions.
I'd love to see a synthesis of arXiv, open-access publishing and artifact reviews, like the following:
- Have a number of reviewers on retainer, or design a reward system similar to bug bounties. The reward mechanism probably shouldn't be based on money or allow a winner-takes-all strategy.
- Have a number of badges with respect to the quality and value of the paper. For example: validated by peers (i.e., reviewed by at least 3 peers with minimum borderline accept consensus), valuable (i.e., reviewed by at least 5 peers with a valuable indicator), etc.
- Allow vouched comments on the platform, and moderate for self-promotion, toxicity, etc. Obviously a big ask.
- Improve the "vouching" system, or add badges like "vouched by X people" or "vouched by established scientist".
Hope their new organization will implement some of these improvements.
I volunteered for a project [1] with roughly this philosophy. Traditional publishing currently serves three purposes:
- Organise peer feedback
- Publish the work
- Recognise good work, helping with both discovery and credit
That latter part especially is what allows publishers to charge the ridiculous markup that they do.
But with "modern" technology, feedback and publishing really doesn't require all that infrastructure - email and arXiv can easily be used to self-organise that. So we built a system of recognition that does not block publication, and can be used as a layer on top of arXiv and any other venue, allowing peers to vouch ("endorse") for a work.
I had even proposed and implemented an integration for arXiv Labs that got accepted, but then never merged. I should follow up on that...
>3. It puts the effort on the readers to decide whether each paper is valuable, and particularly scientifically valuable, for which most readers will be unequipped.
You say it as if replication crisis doesn't exist and publish or perish is not a thing.
Actually, the replication crisis shows how difficult (or underinvested) the process of reviewing is.
Removing this (often very basic) peer review doesn't somehow fix the problem. The solution lies in more thorough reviews and replication studies, not in everyone deciding for themselves.
That worries me a bit. ArXiv was and is great and so useful to humanity, giving access to otherwise closed knowledge, hold by publishers cartel, that I would not like to see it is turning into a "non-profit" of OpenAI kind...
openai had billionaire "donors" who understood the company was going to operate as a PBC with a positive return for them instead of a true nonprofit.
the heel turn to unlimited for profit was only possible because of their unique structure and the fact they were already selling commercial products. arxiv is not selling anything so theres no financial incentive to take over.
This is exactly the play book that messed up scientific communication last time. Journals and research societies run by researchers and their institutions was spun off, sold, and made independent which in turn made it possible for a few publishers to gobble up everything.
Supposing of course your field roughly matches one of the categories.
I really like the idea. In short: arXiv, HAL and similar sites host the papers without any peer review (short of perhaps stopping crank spam) or access control. They're freely available to anyone. Authors then submit arXiv IDs (or similar) to the reviewers of "overlay journals", which then review and accept or not. The overlay journal accepts a paper by just adding it to its list of accepted arXiv identifiers, and that's that.
This ensures accessibility for all, keeps peer review, yet takes a lot of the practical hurdles away from actually running a journal. A journal can now just be a group of people who give thumbs up or down to arXiv identifiers, and if that group's conclusion start having weight in the community then it's become an important journal. Maybe they give away their listings for free, maybe they charge to read the reviews – it's really up to them what the business model (if any) will be.
It's really nice.
My point is that a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status. An unreviewed argument starts to look like established research merely because it adopts the visual grammar of a paper.
My point is it's still useful to have a somewhat authoritative place to cite (high quality) blog post level content. arXiv has formatting requirements and doesn't go down like random personal sites.
> a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status
True to a certain extent, although something people are aware of and they can judge the content themselves (hopefully).
By the way, one of my favorite pastimes is to download the latex source for papers on arxiv and read all the commented-out stuff.
% we should make sure this theorem is actually true
“ArXiv declares independence from Cornell” (science.org)
811 points | 3 months ago | 291 comments
If Google just wanted them to exist and didn't care about profiting off of the search traffic they wouldn't partner with Mozilla.
This isn't me siding with AI companies by the way; it's a slippery slope argument.
It's also good that it doesn't gatekeep with the paywalls that you can pretty much only afford by affiliating yourself with a toll-paying institution.
Obviously, there are plenty of flaws with this system:
1. If you're associated with a brand (e.g., Google, MIT) or have a recognizable co-author (e.g., Yann LeCun), you'll get attention and citations no matter what.
2. "Vouching" can also just mean accepting someone's email request without ever having met or known them.
3. It puts the effort on the readers to decide whether each paper is valuable, and particularly scientifically valuable, for which most readers will be unequipped.
4. "Minimal standards" can be gamed by AI-generated submissions.
I'd love to see a synthesis of arXiv, open-access publishing and artifact reviews, like the following:
- Have a number of reviewers on retainer, or design a reward system similar to bug bounties. The reward mechanism probably shouldn't be based on money or allow a winner-takes-all strategy.
- Have a number of badges with respect to the quality and value of the paper. For example: validated by peers (i.e., reviewed by at least 3 peers with minimum borderline accept consensus), valuable (i.e., reviewed by at least 5 peers with a valuable indicator), etc.
- Allow vouched comments on the platform, and moderate for self-promotion, toxicity, etc. Obviously a big ask.
- Improve the "vouching" system, or add badges like "vouched by X people" or "vouched by established scientist".
Hope their new organization will implement some of these improvements.
- Organise peer feedback - Publish the work - Recognise good work, helping with both discovery and credit
That latter part especially is what allows publishers to charge the ridiculous markup that they do.
But with "modern" technology, feedback and publishing really doesn't require all that infrastructure - email and arXiv can easily be used to self-organise that. So we built a system of recognition that does not block publication, and can be used as a layer on top of arXiv and any other venue, allowing peers to vouch ("endorse") for a work.
I had even proposed and implemented an integration for arXiv Labs that got accepted, but then never merged. I should follow up on that...
[1] https://plaudit.pub/
You definitely should - looks like what I roughly had in mind.
Thanks for sharing!
You say it as if replication crisis doesn't exist and publish or perish is not a thing.
Removing this (often very basic) peer review doesn't somehow fix the problem. The solution lies in more thorough reviews and replication studies, not in everyone deciding for themselves.
the heel turn to unlimited for profit was only possible because of their unique structure and the fact they were already selling commercial products. arxiv is not selling anything so theres no financial incentive to take over.