Why viXra?
vixra.org
vixra.org
I honestly don't understand why people would submit their papers there. The reasons for using arxiv are two-fold:
- It's a great way to prove the priority. Not only Cornell university have great reputation, but arxiv has mirrors and metadata feeds which can be used to detect the retroactive modification. Which means if you see an arxiv publication, you can be sure it's not backdated.
- It's also some way to prove credentials. Paper appearing on arxiv means the author is likely affiliated with academic world, or at least knows someone from there.
vixra has nothing like this. By design, it requires no credentials. It is also has no reputation, for all that we know the articles may be backdated all the time. If you want to prove priority, pretty much any other method would work better - twitter post, usenet post, github comment, even personal website added to wayback machine.
Want to publish anything about free energy, homeopathy, or your favorite personal theory why einstein and darwin were wrong? Vixra is your place to publish.
Well... sure, that's true in the strictest possible sense. But in practice, arXiv does do a measure of gatekeeping that's heavily based around academic affiliation as a criterion. It's just that it's possible with some effort to work around that and submit as someone who is outside of formal academia. Or at least they say it is[1]. I've never tried the process myself and I've heard mixed stories from others who have, about how (easy|hard) it is to get endorsed in such a case.
arXiv requires that users be endorsed before submitting their first paper to
a category.
<snip>
arXiv may give some people automatic endorsements based on subject area,
topic, previous submissions, and academic affiliation. In most cases,
automatic endorsement is given to authors from known academic institutions
and research facilities. arXiv submitters are therefore encouraged to
associate an institutional email address, if they have one, with their arXiv
account (see author registration help). This will expedite the endorsement
process.
<snip>
If you need to be endorsed by someone, it is best for you to find an
endorser who
you know personally and
is knowledgeable in the subject area of your paper.
A good choice for graduate students would be your thesis advisor or another
professor in your department/institution working in your field.
That said, they do explicitly acknowledge the need to occasionally reach out and solicit endorsements from people you don't know. So I assume this does happen.
Alternatively this is the recommended way to proceed.
Start by finding related articles in your field. Your preprint surely has
cited works that are already posted in the arXiv, some of these works will
be particularly relevant.
Bring up these abstracts from the arXiv page.
You can find somebody qualified to endorse by clicking on the link titled
"Which of these authors are endorsers?" at the bottom of every abstract
page.
Using that information, you can then find the email address of the submitter
on the abstract page just under the "Submission history" heading.
And I get emails from time to time asking about that or just people sending mass emails presenting their ideas/work. But graduate students are the bottom of pyramid who do most work but have the least authority and power.
This is not even talking about that what you actually get most of the time is a complete non-sense and you don't usually have time to focus with the good stuff if you get something.
How so? I mean, what danger is there in just endorsing somebody to submit to arXiv? It's not like you're endorsing their work as being correct or anything. An arXiv endorsement is saying nothing more than "this isn't pure bullshit / spam / pseudo-scientific nuttery".
As they say:
The endorsement process is not peer review. You should know the person that you endorse or you should see the paper that the person intends to submit. We don't expect you to read the paper in detail, or verify that the work is correct, but you should check that the paper is appropriate for the subject area. You should not endorse the author if the author is unfamiliar with the basic facts of the field, or if the work is entirely disconnected with current work in the area ...
> The consequences might be huge for any future academic career if this turned south.
How would it "turn south" though? What would that even mean in this context? If you read the paper and judged it to actually not be "pure bullshit / spam / pseudo-scientific nuttery" then unless you made one hell of an error in judgment, there shouldn't be any consequences. From what the arXiv page says, the worst thing that could possibly happen is you could lose your ability to endorse others in the future. Probably not exactly career ending? And note that your endorsement is not public information:
The fact that you have personally endorsed or not endorsed a person (as well as any optional comments) is private between you and the arXiv administrators – this information will not be shared with arXiv users or the person requesting endorsement,
If you start dropping by office hours (as someone suggested) to ask about your theories, you'll probably get a lot of polite "that sounds cool, but it doesn't work because of <cryptic reason>, maybe take a few years of classes and come back". This is a pretty powerful filter: most people will either enroll in a program (and thus cease to be a hobbyist) or give up. Those that remain are going to be pretty exceptional.
Unfortunately exceptional is equally likely to be exceptionally smart or exceptionally unhinged. The later case can easily "go south".
The topic at hand (at least as I took it, and what I was trying to address) is no more than endorsing somebody to submit to arXiv. I'm not suggesting academics should be champing at the bit to offer to collaborate with people who walk in off the street, or spend large amounts of time reading unsolicited papers in detail, etc.
An arXiv endorsement is really just saying "this is generally appropriate to be on arXiv". They're explicit in saying it's not peer-review, and doesn't even require reading the work-to-be-submitted in detail.
There are amazing discoveries that are that are made by relatively obscure people, but having one that is both simple and correct is extremely rare.
True. But let me just point out that somebody wanting to submit to arXiv doesn't necessarily have to be claiming an "amazing" discovery. In fact, a lot of papers that get put up on arXiv represent incremental progress in a very narrow area, at best. I mean, go back to the era when researchers in meta-heuristics would routinely pick "random natural phenomenon" use it as a metaphor for a new meta-heuristic, code something up, improve by 1% on some published benchmark and name their "new algorithm" something like "the gopher tunnel method" or whatever and get a paper published. Some of those papers almost certainly wound up on arXiv before being published in whatever journal or conference proceeding they eventually wound up in.
Speaking for myself, I know that if I were cold emailing somebody in academia to ask them to endorse me, it would almost certainly be for CS.LG or CS.AI and it would probably be something along those lines. An incremental improvement or minor "breakthrough" in an AI area. It wouldn't be to claim a solution to the P=NP problem or anything like that. And I'd hope that somebody would be willing to help out.
That said, it seems like it might be easy for someone to be endorsed if their work is scholarly.
You can just email them or even hijack office hours if they don't respond.
Some slouch off the street deeply enthusiastic in their subject and trying to do work in it is basically definitionally exciting for academics, trust me. Meeting the next Srinivasa Ramanujan is a dream like winning the lotto.
I will say this: I've never asked for an arXiv endorsement before, but I have cold emailed professors before to inquire about certain aspects of their work. Not often mind you, but once or twice. And I've told this story here before at some point, but the response I got the first time around was overwhelmingly positive. I'm pretty sure the guy was thrilled that anybody was interested enough to read his book and send a question about it. He sent the data I was looking for, a pre-print of another related forthcoming paper from his group, and a standing invitation to reach out with additional queries in the future.
So based on that n=1 anecdote, I feel pretty good that at least some academic types would be happy to provide an arXiv endorsement to somebody doing work related to theirs. It's no guarantee of course, but my hunch is that if one is doing non-crank work, they can probably find an endorser with some effort.
People don't work in university research for the pay, it's garbage, I assure you.
I was a research associate about 15 years ago. The top tier CS researcher at that leading university payscale was something like $70k, that was the cap out.
It's pretty good in the US. I just looked up a randomly chosen assistant professor at a public university and they make $200k. I only looked up one person's salary so this isn't cherry picked.
I'm not saying that they're in it for the money. I'm only disagreeing with the part where you said that the pay is garbage.
It's not an infinite amount of money and it's less than industry, but it seems not garbage considering job prestige, job benefits, etc.
https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/
A lot of professors are making over 200k, but most that I knew were around 150k.
(You can also find all the 5M positions, usually head coach)
These kind of requests have an extremely low signal to noise ratio (as in: I never heard once coming something out of this) and no one wastes their time with this. I also think it's basically impossible to contribute to my former field, theoretical physics, without a formal education. Sorry, I know it's not fair.
If you're a just a curious layman with an honest question that doesn't imply you solved the world's most difficult problems, you may get a few pointers to ressources, but I wouldn't expect a research collaboration.
[1] https://www.rnz.de/region/heidelberg_artikel,-Uni-Heidelberg... (sadly paywalled now)
I'd imagine the kind of outside inquiry that would be possible is if someone found a new computation model for some raw data that successfully passed rigorous tests and then did new feature X.
We also had some of the later case dropping into our seminars. For the most part people found them kind of entertaining.
Well, I know quite some people who left academia because they became victims of academic politics, or just had enormous difficulties getting their employment contracts extended, despite doing great research. I get research papers from this kind of people somewhat regularly. All of them look at least very plausible to me.
When I was still in academia, I honestly only know these "crackpot stories" from narrations (dark fairy tales); I never got any "crackpot papers", even though the particular research area is said to be prone to crackpots (perhaps the reason was that crackpots need some basic knowledge about the respective research area to realize that the colleagues of the institute actually do research in an area that is very related to their crackpot papers, so they never sent their crackpot papers to my colleagues).
Both excellent academic institutions but one is you know, mentioned in James Bond and superhero movies.
If you can't (or won't) post to arxiv, get a blog and post there. Plenty of people do so.
I once read that arXiv is everything good about science, remember Perelman published his groundbreaking here, but now I have my doubts [1]. I think this a good opportunity to have an automated AI based repository with proper timestamp, no backtracking and non-repudiattion features as an alternative to arXiv without human gatekeeper in place. The paper's authors can be charged a small fees for the submission to this new online research repository so that their originality of idea and contribution is timestamped properly.
[1]The Non-Peer-Reviewed Proof That Won the Fields Medal:
https://siddharthlabh.medium.com/the-non-peer-reviewed-proof...
(I have published there without an affiliation to a research institution.)
viXra by comparison is fighting an uphill battle since they get only the arXiv runoff. Making an inclusive venue that's actually worth publishing in would require attracting not only the runoff from other venues but also poach the best people from said venues.
Inclusiveness in research is something I've always wanted to solve, but it seems really hard - if e.g. 10% of the incumbent elite are good and 1% of the outcasts are good (and the other 99% is mostly cranks), then the task is to get the respective 10% and 1% to mingle somehow without the rest. And I'm not even convinced arXiv has any inclusivity problem at all - it's more places like Nature that have inclusivity problems. viXra might be barking up the wrong tree.
Unfortunately I expect that this has not turned out to be the case. Why? Because so many cranks and crackpots submit stuff to viXra that it has become known as - as said by a fellow HN'er in this thread - "the favorite preprint server for pseudoscience". Meaning viXra doesn't "not have a reputation" but rather it actually has a negative reputation.
So if you're a serious researcher who happens to operate outside of formal academia, and you have something you want to share, you're actually better of not submitting to viXra. You should just post to your personal website and then share with Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Facebook, HN, whatever. You could also upload your paper to sites like academia.edu or ResearchGate which might help get it some visibility among academics.