You should upload your paper to arXiv. When you do, please upload your source (tex, or word I imagine), as well as a PDF.
For the blind, PDF is the worst possible format, and tex and word are the best formats. Don't hide, or lose, the blind-accessible version of your paper.
I learned a lot about not underestimating people there.
It's a strange university but it always makes me happy to think that it (specifically Ginsparg, and to some degree strogatz and the law scholars) pushed forward what the Web was supposed to be.
Not a place to buy stuff, but a place to learn stuff, without waiting for it to make its way through a hyper politicized review process so that it could be printed in a 17th century fashion and mailed to some corners of the world, eventually perhaps reaching a fraction of the people who could use it. Rather, everyone everywhere with a connection.
Anyone who doesn't deposit preprints (arXiv, biorxiv, or wherever) or who doesn't agitate for their coauthors to do so is not really in it for the science. It's fine to be competitive -- deposit yours first. Make the fucking discovery instead of parasitically piggybacking on those who do the work.
But that last part, that's hard. Very hard. As long as there is enough money left in academia to encourage lazy shits, those of us who care about scholarship will have to push, hard, to remove the last refuge of these scoundrels.
You're either on the side of justice -- open data, open formats, open scholarship -- or you are tacitly endorsing Elsevier & Springer, who haven't the slightest problem using crap like incremental JavaScript & mangled PDFs to deny access to scholarship even to those who have paid.
David (blocking on his last name) at CTC made that choice for me. He set an example that forced me to admit what was right. I hope others will do the same. It's the right thing to do.
I think advocates of sharing science should also understand that, at present, the majority of the content is asinine or incorrect. Removing checks and balances is not helping.
It's not at all clear to me that the checks or balances were helping beforehand. Hiring a shit ton of MBA types to administer research probably didn't help much either.
Also, out of curiosity, is this open access / fast review problem what led to machine learning falling into irrelevance?
Because we wouldn't want that to happen to other fields. Can you imagine if raw clinical trial data was out there, for example? (The Horror! Best keep these appallingly expensive results locked up!)
Why? As the first author of several publications, more than half the reviews I received were not well thought out. This part of the process doesn't happen, Open Acess and self publishing websites exploited this fact for greater throughput.
>>machine learning
I would argue that the machine learning bloom in recent years is because of an availability of new technology from industry, supported by industry. This is also why they were able to tolerate less conventional venues for publication - as these were not viewed as mile markers for progress. Yet, when I look at more "settled" machine learning fields like speech, I see the same plethora of academic papers filled with useless crap.
Perhaps the growth of ML has nothing to do with Open Acess. There is although certainly there is an underlying profit motive for successful technologies, Google ain't going to use a technique that doesn't work.
>>raw clinical trial data
It would be great if it were published, and indeed many people would pay for quality trial data. I see OA and self-publishing of research results having no relation to authors withholding clinical data.
In the end it's the people who may or may not try to build on your work (or mine!) that are the best judges of whether it's BS.
Re: 2: probably, but diffusion of ideas benefits massively from readily accessible documentation. One of the things that will cause me to immediately reject a paper is if its method implementation does not work as described. I will always reject in such cases. They are alarmingly common and this is one of the few easy cases in reviewing. Lack of an implementation is also cause to reject.
Re: 3: it has everything to do with it. Unless you're running and publishing trials please don't lecture me on this. See opentrials for a particularly frightening take on why published trials so poorly represent those submitted to the FDA or registered with CTEP. Meanwhile actual RCTs get buried by shitbags demanding more subjects than there are recorded cases in the past 40 years (no joke).
If you're not doing trials, you may have to take my word for it (or get involved in RCTs and find out for yourself). A lot of the enterprise is actively harmful to science by omission.
"If nobody cared about your opinion, it would not be financially viable to publish it. But now we have blogs/tweets."
Effectively, cost of publishing was working as a quality filter. Now, we need to actually implement proper filters instead of bad proxies for quality.
If I just leave that out you seem to imply science publications should be selected by whether enough people care about, or whether they are boring or not. Both (especially the latter) are rather bad measuring sticks for the quality and importance of research.
Adding "financially viable" to "less boring" produces "EXCITING!", adding it to "enough people care" yields "POPULAR!". These are definitely not forces that should be pulling scientific research.
Not saying there shouldn't be checks. Just that market forces are probably too stupid for it.
Although that's not giving BuzzFeed enough credit, they tend to check their sources & verify results/reports. Also if a piece of fake news is simply resubmitted, they don't pretend like they never checked on it before.
There are plenty of checks (mostly from NIH, mostly for incremental garbage work on dead models like cell lines) and very few balances against the tyranny of CNS...
But this isn't something I've looked for in the past. So I wonder: in your experience, about what percentage of papers on the arXiv have included the source?
I'm surprised. Nobody has created an accessibility solution for PDFs after all these years of ubiquity? What's the story?
As an example, in post script the following example from Wikipedia would simply show the text Hello World:
%!PS
/Courier % name the desired font
20 selectfont % choose the size in points and establish
% the font as the current one
72 500 moveto % position the current point at
% coordinates 72, 500 (the origin is at the
% lower-left corner of the page)
(Hello world!) show % stroke the text in parentheses
showpage % print all on the page
It makes me wonder how screen readers work. Thinking out loud, it seems that the screen readers should let the applications (e.g., Word) handle their own parsing and presentation and obtain the data after that. Otherwise, the screen reader would have to reinvent many wheels, interpreting the code for all applications including all their versions, features, quirks, and platform integration issues - such a daunting and difficult task that it seems unlikely. But where do screen readers hook into the content? After it's output from the application but before it's an image for the screen (which could require OCR)? Ironically, I suppose PostScript or PDF could provide common interfaces.
PostScript and PDF have no such separation, the are the display logic. They are fully fledged programs that list the position, size, font, colour, of every symbol on every page, if you're lucky in a vaguely logical order, but there's no reason it should be. If the files were written by a human you may have some hope of extracting some of the content, but almost nobody writes PDF or PostScript by hand any-more.
With PDFs, all you have is the position of lines and characters on the page. There is no flow, ordering, or semantics.
It's not impossible, but I wouldn't know immediately what tools get this most right. And it's always a lossy operation going back and forth.
I've had arXiv automatically block bare uploads of TeX-derived PDFs (presumably identified through PDF metadata). For these, it required that the source be uploaded and compiled on their server.
On balance, it's probably best to require source as arXiv does, but this can create interesting issues from time to time. Since the source is downloadable, researchers can inadvertently end up sharing partial results or snark that was commented out in the TeX source.
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/21838/replace-inputf...
The basic (and unfortunate in a xkcd/1479 way) issue appears to be that the arXiv compile server doesn't allow writing to subdirectories. A subdir \include implicitly requires write access for the aux file.
Would be nice if latex embedded the source of equations into pdfs. Wonder how hard that would be to add?
How large are latex files ? probably not much a few 100KBs. It's easy to add a compressed stream in a PDF. It's a great idea.