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Comment by hirenj | Hacker News Reader

It is a huge worry for me that unless we decouple the publishing “system” from the career pathways (i.e., rewards), we are going to lose access to both the careers (to robot-weilding bullshitters) and even worse, the shared space where scientific communication took place.

Does anyone know of any writing on the network effects of the publishing system? What would happen if the actual value of the journals (of the little they provide!) were to go away?

The death of scientific twitter, and the failure to establish any replacement makes me worry that we won’t be able to coalesce around a replacement system. Obviously preprints play a role, but we really need our scientific communities to engage with them in a more serious way.

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The arxiv should itself embed a review and commenting system, possibly even blogging. Publishers are archaic, scientific social media should be arxiv's future.

I like this idea.

But it should be a separate entity for robustness's sake.

Let's make it! We'll even hold weekly live video/audio discussions on each paper for it's lifetime.

Let the errant and emerging thoughts of researchers accompany the original research so we can better iterate and grow. In the open.

The risk is that publishers might then start opposing the publication of manuscripts that have been shared as preprints on arXiv, if they start perceiving it as a competitor and not a supplement to their "service". But I concur, arXiv with social media features would be nice.

> The death of scientific twitter, and the failure to establish any replacement

In my field it's mostly in LinkedIn now.

Can you say what field that is? I hear this sometimes, but my feed there is significantly low signal to noise, and I have had to pollute my “connections” to the point where I accept everything, as I have been trying to advertise job openings using it too (which frankly has been pretty poor too).

My field now is Earth observation/geoinformatics and my recent connections are mostly academics and applied programmers. Also, mostly Europe-based and very few in the US. My feed is mainly about new papers, conferences, tools, webinars etc..

I used to do corporate software dev and my feed (and work) back then wasn't that interesting. I barely used the site.

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