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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

arxiv is actually less open than most traditional venues.

Anyone can submit to most conferences and journals. Anyone at all! No PhD or reputation needed and it’s blind. All that matters is the quality of the research.

To submit to arxiv you need to be approved by someone as a legitimate researcher, or beg for reviews from people you’ve never met without any anonymity.

It’s somewhat a step backwards in some ways.

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It is my impression that, if the quality of work is good, it is easy to get arXiv endorsements. I believe that intent is not to form a clique nor gatekeep, but rather to keep arXiv from being buried under a giant pile of internet spam and crackpots.

https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement

This goes both ways. It’s obviously an unfortunate barrier to entry but it generally means the content on the arxiv is reputable and meets a certain bar (and submission is not in any way anonymous because members are verified which can discourage low quality submissions). Compare the arxiv to vixra. It seems unfair to Cornell university library to have them moderate submissions for scientific quality and those people who currently use it would not want to have to filter through the new papers in their topic of interest to determine which papers were worth reading and which would be a largely wrong waste of time (I think here I’m perhaps being a bit unfair and for many fields there would likely be no time wasters and in others it would be easy if annoying to filter out the p=np or Riemann hypothesis papers)

I don’t think that letting anyone submit is a good solution.

> I don’t think that letting anyone submit is a good solution.

I think their process is totally reasonable and I’d probably do the same... but I do think it’s a fact that it’s now less accessible and more based on reputation and credentials and we should acknowledge that.

I wonder which is more likely though. An unpublished and non-PhD author being published in a journal after submission, or that same author being allowed to publish on arXiv. My guess would be on arXiv.

If you really have a decent breakthrough, I'm pretty sure your best bet is to directly contact some relevant people in the field.

Which is more likely: you get a paper, yet unreviewed for formatting and style by any expert in the field, accepted into a conference or journal, or you get someone with field expertise to review for format and style, and they let you post to arxiv?

I see. I just meant that we have a place where publication is technically easy. No year-long waits. Everything is immediately available online. No physical paper involved.

I suppose that changing the technoligcal base to fully electronic, immediate-mode publishing should help.

Building a review workflow, or several, around the fully electronic and open archive of all published results should be doable.

Storing online everything by default, including all the negative results, proofs of the null hypothesis, full datasets and code, etc, should not be overly expensive, but would help reproducibility and further research a lot.

I think those are called blogs. And they haven't really made much of an impact.

> To submit to arxiv you need to be approved by someone as a legitimate researcher, or beg for reviews from people you’ve never met without any anonymity.

I did not have to do something like this.

I did not have to do so formally, either. Being a co-author on an arXiv paper or two counts, I believe, as endorsement.

Whenever the problem has come up for a colleague, it has been straightforward to endorse.

Well that’s good for you isn’t it! What about everyone else? Not everyone is automatically approved because of things like their email address. That’s my point - they focus on reputation and credentials rather than the blind value of the work. It’s less accessible.

The confusion comes from the 'journal' aka topic on arXiv, which can have different settings for when an author can submit. Some are more stringent than others. It is not an arXiv wide issue.

Nonsense. Only the editorial board can approve you to publish in the journal or comference. Approximately anyone on Arxiv can approve to you to publish on Arxiv.

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