A feature that arXiv should have built years ago | Hacker News Reader

A feature that arXiv should have built years ago

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37 pointslmessi11 comments

FWIW, 13 submissions to this over the last couple of months - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=20d2b048cf92&sort=byDate&dateR... , with different titles and different marketing campaign tags.

The HN guideline suggests preserving the original title, which is "Comments on arXiv papers".

Unfortunately, it seems like these comments are only visible to Librarian's users, which doesn't make it much different from Hypothes.is [1] other than being limited to arXiv, and makes comments less discoverable. arXiv should really add such a feature itself/have open sourced its code so they could've added it there.

[1] http://hypothes.is/

It's tricky. Many (most?) researchers would rather have a closed discussion with other researchers with domain expertise than an open one where they have to deal with public comments.

I think this is certainly true. Research papers are typically written so that a person with training in the field can understand and replicate the work. Note that the general population is not the intended audience. Mediums like news articles and blog posts are a more effective way of explaining the background and significance of a certain piece of research to the masses.

Yes, but that's still hard if half of those other researchers are on Librarian, and half of them are on Hypothes.is.

I've always thought stack overflow could be the start of a model for an academic archive.

A plea to the people behind Fermat's Library - please port the Librarian extension to Firefox, too! It has full support for the WebExtensions API that Chrome uses, so porting is usually just a matter of a small tweak to the manifest.json and re-uploading it to the Mozilla Add-on Gallery.

Alternatively you can create a bookmark that opens the comments page for every paper on Firefox. Here's the code: https://pastebin.com/4f4YbWvn

There have been many comment layering systems for arxiv, none of which seem to have taken off. Also, users are pretty split on whether they want this: http://www.nature.com/news/arxiv-preprint-server-plans-multi... . Personally I'm not in favour of such a system, as it's unlikely anyone would spend enough time to write a high quality comment that won't detract from a paper.

I would love to see the addition of peer reviewed comments. Curation is key, of course.

I will toot the hypothes.is [0] horn again. It is possible (if sometimes finicky) to use it to annotate pdfs. See for example a demo annotation [1]. The other really cool thing about this is that hypothes.is fingerprints pdfs and uses a URN to uniquely identify them, so you can annotate a local copy of a pdf (in the browser) and those annotations will show up on any other copy of that pdf anywhere on the internet.

0. https://hypothes.is/ 1. https://hyp.is/hZbgFO_ZEeemmt9kojvZIA/arxiv.org/pdf/1712.100...

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