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Comment by biomcgary | Hacker News Reader

When I first saw this, I thought "Maybe they are cruising arXiv for new papers?"

They aren't. BUT, I would love to see something like this happen for all science journals:

1. You post a paper to arXiv (or equivalent for your field).

2. Preliminary review by whoever is interested (and is qualified to publish on arXiv themselves)

3. Interested editors of various journals contact you with a list of proposed in-depth reviewers (or just accept based on quality of existing reviews).

4. Address reviewer questions (to the extent you think valuable)

5. Post update to arXiv.

6. Editor decides to publish or pass (return to step 3).

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This kind of happens in the life sciences, PLoS has editors that look through biorxiv and invite submissions: https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jo...

eLife also has started its own pipeline for invited preprints: https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-review

It's not without controversy. Especially the eLife decision to not have an accept/reject decision is controversial (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00831-6). Personally, I think it's a good decision, there is no place for 'old-style' journals in the way science is developing.

arXiv overlay journals are a thing, and should be more common. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03383

This is actually kind of appealing, in my experience "shopping" for the right journal for an article can be kind of a pain when you're in a smaller field. You'd likely get a ton of spam from that large tranche of fake journals that just exist to collect excessive publication fees, though. I already get lots of that unsolicited :(.

My dream would be arxiv hosting a reddit-style upvote/downvote discussion thread for every paper. I've seen this work beautifully on some science subreddits, as well as on Scot Aaranson and Terence Tao's blogs. It can really help flesh out problems/questions, generate intelligent discussion, and even lead to cooperation between participants on further research. One requirement for it to work is strong moderation to keep the discussion focused.

Sounds like a job for a dedicated Lemmy/kbin instance

Maybe, but you really want all the discussion easily discoverable and in a central authoritative place to encourage experts in the field to find and join the conversation.

Isn't that implied by "dedicated instance" regardless of "lemmy"?

I’m just saying that Lemmy or kbin software gives you the tools to build just that quite easily

ArXiv has deliberately left the implementation of such systems to others. There's nothing stopping anyone from making such an overlay, should they choose to do so (and many have tried).

The problem that you get then is fragmentation. Everybody will be on a different service, and the discussions don't get off the ground.

Prestigious journals, assuming reasonable editors, can spontaneously emerge and attract submissions. Authors publish in journals based upon some combination of 1) editorial quality, 2) whether or not everyone else in their field publishes in it, and 3) prestige.

2 and 3 are self-reinforcing effects -- why does Nature attract prestigious papers? Because it publishes prestigious papers. Why does Nature attract high-quality research? Because it is full of high-quality research.

All of this is to say that it is likely that, given a distribution of reasonably-edited arXiv-overlay journals, there's a pretty good chance that just a few of them in any given field (or at large) will attract most of the serious work

Scirate [1] is an arxiv overlay with upvotes (called scites) and a comment section. The scite function does quite help a lot with bubbling up the better papers to the top. But I have never seen any serious discussion in the comments section - only clarifying questions, or missed citations.

[1] https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph (go to previous day to see more scites)

That wouldn’t work with double blind review. It would simply entrench the already popular researchers.

Even today the editors will know and corresond with you. They then send it to the reviewers, to make it double blind. But I see your argument with already popular researchers for the selection step..

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