Indian scientists launch preprint repository to boost research quality | Hacker News Reader

Indian scientists launch preprint repository to boost research quality

nature.com

51 pointssohkamyung13 comments

What is the point of a country/province specific arxiv?

to promote competition.

That's an argument for multiple preprint servers, not region-specific servers.

Language is one of the biggest reasons. India, Indonesia and Africa are all countries with scores of different languages. Some of these are often languages in which research is conducted and communicated. Having a region specific preprint server allows people to communicate research in their own language. Then of course there are region specific research topics that the global scientific community might not care about.

But in India, I haven't seen any higher education research entity using any language other than English.

Agreed, but they do mention it on their website:

> The IndiaRxiv repository accepts all the scholarly works in english and all the indian languages...

http://indiarxiv.in/policy/

Yup it makes as much sense as an Indian HN.

Ideally, all researchers would upload their works to an open access repository. If that were already happening, there would be no need for a country-specific arxiv. An Indian arxiv may motivate people in the Indian research ecosystem to upload their works as a matter of national pride. I may not sympathize with the motivation, but as long as the papers are freely accessible, I have no reason to complain.

I've found a huge number of highly interesting papers out of India published in predatory journals. Unfortunately this leads to numerous problems:

Barely anyone learns of them, and those who do have to treat them with extreme caution, because they lack sane peer review. Here's one example:

http://www.worldacademicunion.com/journal/1746-7659JIC/jicvo...

The Universal Padovan Code

Really interesting cryptography-related work building on top of https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0701085, extending it from the golden ratio to the only other "morphic number", the plastic number. (See this recent Numberphile video for an introduction to the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsGUEj4w9Cc)

And I have tons of additional examples, but this one especially irks me, because I suspect such a line of research could help with homeomorphic encryption.

Asians in general face a major problem of lacking in formal English and technical writing skills.

Paired with the scarcity of quality mentor grad students (getting into a grad programs is way easier than getting in into UG programs, the best students head to other countries ) and massive societal pressures, it is incredibly difficult to write papers at a tier 1 level.

This leads to students submitting promising but half baked work to predatory journals/conferences just to get some closure.

Source : submitted promising robotics work to IEEE-IROS. Got praised for the key innovation, got blasted for shoddy writing and underexperimentation. With more time it could have been better, but by then it was time to graduate and head to greener pastures.

It's great that they are explicitly recommending that researchers post with a Share-Alike licence: CC-BY-NC-SA

http://indiarxiv.in/policy/

(This would be like Wikipedia, CC BY-SA, except with no commercial use allowed.)

The arXiv has sadly only recommendee posters use the minimal license: unlimited distribution, but no modifications allowed. In contrast, a Share-Alike licence allows researchers to build on each other's documents (e.g., review articles) rather than just ideas.

IndiaRXiv apparently has a twitter account but no live website yet. Hmph.

http://indiarxiv.in/

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