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Comment by Accujack | Hacker News Reader

It's not over yet, at least not definitively. Nature Magazine like every other source so far is basing its comments on the attempted replications using the leaked paper. It's considered fairly certain at this point that the paper was incomplete/not enough to duplicate the material.

The full paper with the original samples were reportedly sent to Korea University of Science and Technology for examination. That lab group has only so far verified the structure of the material, no word on whether they've replicated it or its actual properties based on replicated samples or the original samples.

Until we hear from them, everyone (including Nature) is just guessing.

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Of course there's some sour grapes in Nature's article, as arxiv.org has had the best exposure it's likely to get in years. The more that publish there, the fewer who publish behind firewalls, etc. For starters, Nature's reprints are hellishly expensive.

> arxiv.org has had the best exposure it's likely to get in years. The more that publish there, the fewer who publish behind firewalls

We're talking about condensed matter physics here, arxiv needs zero exposure in this field. It is extremely common to publish on arxiv first and only then begin the process of submitting the same manuscript to be published (and peer reviewed) in a journal.

And while there are still some authors that skip over publishing pre-prints at all, there's no serious arxiv competitor if you do decide to publish pre-prints. It is a de-facto monopoly in this field.

True, but it's given the site more exposure in the general sense, it's now quoted by outlets that probably hadn't heard of it before this 'excitement'. (That can only help in the long run, one day Elbakyan mightn't need to do what she does.)

And Nature is still trying to whitewash its own reputation for publishing a very high visibility paper on superconduction that they had to retract.

Right, thanks, I forgot about that.

What paper was that?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05294-9

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