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Comment by mschuetz | Hacker News Reader

ArXiv is great. I encourage anyone to submit their work there in addition to submitting to a peer-reviewed venue. Thankfully, they're compatible with overleaf nowadays. There was a time when arxiv didn't accept stuff from overleaf but it also didn't accept pdfs made from latex, so I had to pdf-print my pdf to submit it to arxiv.

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Yes, arXiv generally doesn't accept PDF's, preferring instead the tex source (which is amusing when people don't realize their comments show up. It uses something called autotex which has a few quirks (e.g. all images have to be in the same dir, etc.).

Here is the makefile I use that also generates a .tar.gz for the arxiv (obviously won't help with Overleaf without cloning first, but)

    FIGURES=$(wildcard figs/*) 
    TEXFILES=main.tex included.tex included2.tex ...

    main.pdf: $(TEXFILES) $(FIGURES) main.bib 
         latexmk -pdf -g $< 

    .PHONY: clean show

    clean:
        latexmk -C 
        rm -rf forarxiv* 

    forarxiv.tar.gz: forarxiv/main.tex forarxiv.pdf 
        rm -f forarxiv.tar.gz 
        cd forarxiv &&  tar --exclude=*.bib -cvzf ../forarxiv.tar.gz *

    forarxiv: 
       mkdir -p $@

    forarxiv/main.tex: main.tex main.bib | forarxiv
       latexpand --empty-comments $< | sed -e 's#figs/##g' > $@

    forarxiv/main.bib: main.bib
       cp $< $@

    forarxiv.pdf: forarxiv/main.tex $(FIGURES) forarxiv/main.bib
       ln -f $(FIGURES) forarxiv/
       ln -f foo.sty forarxiv/
       ln -f foo.bst forarxiv/
       latexmk -cd -pdf forarxiv/main.tex 
       latexmk -cd -c forarxiv/main.tex 
       mv forarxiv/main.pdf $@



    show: main.pdf 
        xdg-open main.pdf

Do you think it would be worthwhile to upload something like a master's thesis that ultimately did not get published through a traditional journal? That happens to be my case. I am alright with my supervisors' decision to not pursue publication, however I still wish to have it out there in some form, as it took a sizeable amount of effort, and it might be useful as a way to advertise myself.

On a tangent, is publishing the LaTeX source of a paper or thesis on GitHub something that people do...? I was also toying with the idea of writing my thesis with org-mode while including the code snippets I used for numerical calculations and graphs.

I can't attest to ArXiv publication, I didn't consider it actually (I may now, though to be honest mine is not groundbreaking research by any stretch of imagination), but publishing the LaTeX source on GitHub is definitely relatively common. I and a few acquaintances I knew from my Master's program did that.

I imagine it depends on the field. Having perused your GitHub page and taken a look at what your program was about, I see why you might publish your thesis' source there. People working in theoretical physics aren't too inclined towards free software, so maybe that's why I haven't seen many related papers.

Ah yes, I assumed computer science, apologies.

>On a tangent, is publishing the LaTeX source of a paper or thesis on GitHub something that people do...?

I've definitely seen it done, although I suspect the prime concern is versioning and backup.

The tex for my thesis is on github but I don't expect anyone to ever look at it there (anyone who might read it will find it on arxiv), I just used github for backup & versioning (I'm not quite dumb enough to have a document representing 4 years work in one place).

"arXiv moderators expect submissions to be of scholarly archival interest to the communities they represent. A submission may be declined if the moderators determine it lacks originality, novelty, or significance.

Submissions that do not contain original or substantive research, including undergraduate research, course projects, and research proposals, news, or information about political causes (even those with potential special interest to the academic community) may be declined." as explained in https://arxiv.org/help/moderation

If your supervisors decided not to pursue publication then it seems likely that it does not match these criteria either. Note, this isn't a qualitative judgement about your thesis - as it says as much about academia as it does your thesis.

Additionally, you might run into the endorsement system if you're new to arXiv. https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement

> Submissions that do not contain original or substantive research

Most, if not all master's thesis contain original research, and that is definitely my case as well.

> undergraduate research, course projects, and research proposals, news, or information about political causes

My thesis can't be classified under any of these categories, either.

It does sound like I would be able to publish it there, but I'm going to have to reach out to my supervisors for an endorsement in arXiv, thanks for the tip.

I believe they weren't inclined towards publishing it because I did not quite manage to fulfill their expectations with respect to the scope of the thesis. I came across quite a few bumps along the way which hindered my progress. It was still graded well enough, it has a good amount of original content, and I am relatively satisfied with its quality, though, so it's not like it was a complete disaster.

You should do it, but contact your advisor first. I know I'd like to upload my old masters thesis online, but the university retains a copyright on it. Its possible yours does to. I'm sure the information on that would be available on your schools website in the thesis format/guidelines sections.

Didn't mean to imply it was a disaster; but without being familiar with your work the main signal in your comment was that your supervisors didn't push for publishing it, which might be a hint it's not a good fit for arXiv either. But if your supervisors will endorse you then by all means go for it!

Another option might be to put it on Zenodo.

>worthwhile to upload something like a master's thesis

That'd be great. Seems dumb to let talented, hard-working student papers moulder on some basement shelf. (Or do they file 13 'em?) I've run across several onlined, very readable and informative masters' works over the years. Tend to be less hidebound about fresh theories/tooling as well.

There are some theses on the arXiv but it's relatively rare. See e.g. https://arxiv.org/search/?query=dissertation&searchtype=all&...

Typically these are uploaded in some other archive that may be less open (e.g. often outsourced to proquest or something), but many universities have their own open archives. My PhD thesis is available on MIT dspace. Hilariously, it's a scanned copy of my printed thesis, since I had to print it out for submission, even in 2015.

As for theses on GitHub, those happen but often people keep it private since they don't necessarily want the revision history exposed :).

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