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Comment by HerrMonnezza | Hacker News Reader

> What you lose on arxiv is peer review.

Or, instead, you get a much larger audience reviewing your article, instead of the 2 to 4 reviewers involved in the paper publishing process :-)

You can get comments from critical and interested readers, you upload a new version of the paper to arXiv, and repeat the process until the article is ready for submission/publishing.

In other words: I think that an article on arXiv (on average and as a whole, individual articles may be exceptional) is subject to much wider and more extensive scrutiny and verification than the average article during the paper publication process.

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Well, if all one wants is an "audience" one can simply report the results of their research on twitter. Much bigger audience. But that's not the point, is it? The point is that you want someone who knows their shit, to review your paper, and who will have both the knowledge and the motivation to engage with your work critically and help you see what is behind all those big blind spots we all have for our own work. I'm sure this happens with papers put on arxiv, occasionally, but my expectation is that just because the paper is on arxiv most people will not be that interested in making a serious effort to review it, and that it is much more likely that such a serious effort will be made by a reviewer in a peer-reviewd venue, particularly one of the top journals (conference reviews are a mess).

So, yeah, I disagree. The level of scrutiny one gets from putting their work on arxiv doesn't compare with peer review by experts in one's field.

People cite preprints in their references. So as an expert you can find the preprints that others based their work one. And you can use a tool like google scholar to find preprints that cite a particular work to build on it. It fits neatly into the same old systems experts always used to find your work. And is much faster.

In mathematics, it’s a continuum:

Discussion starts in blog posts, on Twitter, in conversations.

Then longer blog posts and code demos.

Then pre-prints and more blog posts about that.

Then finally journal.

You get incredibly less review at the publication stage — and your idea “experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet is hilariously wrong.

>> You get incredibly less review at the publication stage — and your idea “experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet is hilariously wrong.

I'm glad to hear you're amused by my comment. Where did I express the idea that '“experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet'? Can you please show me?

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