ArXiv Hits 1M Submissions | Hacker News Reader

ArXiv Hits 1M Submissions

library.cornell.edu

103 pointsfootpath16 comments

Until they get rid of that annoying endorsement system, I submit to SSRN. The endorsement system is a major hurdle for unaffiliated publishers and it still doesn't keep nonsense and wrong stuff from occasionally appearing on the site. The traditional peer review process is very time consuming and difficult, and I think it's time to replace it with an open review or some more democratic form of review. The future of academic publishing could be journals being replaced by Wikis that allow researchers to continuously update stuff in real time, making the results available to public free of charge like this example of page that been updated since 2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stockequation/sandbox

If somethings sounds promising and or passes the smell test, researchers may try to verify the results independently , with or without peer review

I think "journals being replaced by Wikis that allow researchers to continuously update stuff in real time" would be a terrible idea.

If I'm going to use someone's results as basis for my own research, I really want to know that this is a final, "as good as they reasonably can make it" result, not an "oh we're not quite done with the hard, ungratifying work of actually crossing the ts and dotting the is but here it is" kind of result.

Versioning solves this problem. It's effectively the same as people publishing follow up work. Most of the time the initial publication on things isnt comprehensive. For example in computer science people publish their idea to conferences because it is fast then submit a longer form to a journal where they have more room to include things like proofs.

I wonder if there will (soon) be a service such as the original arXiv but for the masses. By that I mean an eprint repository without any sort of peer review or endorsement, while making complete removal or withdrawal purposely impossible, which seems to be a feature unique to arXiv [1]. It looks like viXra does away with the endorsement requirement, but it does allow complete removal [2].

For archival purposes the policy that forbids withdrawal seems to outweigh any other considerations. (I'm sure arXiv has made some exceptions during all this years, for instance if the content is shown to come from a different source.)

[1] http://arxiv.org/help/withdraw

[2] You can remove old versions if you wish using the removal form, but remember that one purpose of viXra is to record the priority of your discoveries. http://vixra.org/faq

What are the masses going to publish?

Good news are hard to come by. When seminal papers will get there first, things will be well on their way!

One example of this happening: Perlman's proof of the Poincare conjecture was posted on the arXiv first (http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0211159). In fact, I don't think it was ever formally published.

Yes, and for those who may not know, Perelman is to date the only mathematician to have rejected the Fields Medal. (Aside: I was at the Madrid congress when this was announced in 2006. Pretty shocking, if not completely unexpected.) So, I think we are dealing with a pretty clear outlier here.

I can understand refusing the money on principle, but it's always nice to have money for a rainy day. Healthcare ain't cheap

Maybe he lives in a developed country so has access to state healthcare.

2006 article

"A maths genius who won fame last week for apparently spurning a million-dollar prize is living with his mother in a humble flat in St Petersburg, co-existing on her £30-a-month pension, because he has been unemployed since December."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1526782/Worlds-top-maths-gen...

They even changed the rules for the Fields Medal so that he would be eligible. Technically the arXiv document was a preprint, and the Fields Medal was for published research.

Sensibly, that rule was changed.

As someone who follows (or tries to) the cutting edge in machine learning and data analysis I have found that I often see really useful ideas on arxiv first which may latter appear in some form somewhere else (conference, journal).

Conversely some more prestigious/general interest journals like science and nature tend to favor papers based on novelty in a way which often results in them highlighting an interesting problem domain but not a best-in-class method. Indeed they often reject follow up pieces that improve on the published method.

This is really great news. I hope that the Open Access movement will continue to grow, so that one day, the science community gets rid of all those toxic restrictions imposed by the current big publishers.

Satisfied to contribute towards it - I try to upload a copy of all my papers there before it gets published.

The arXiv.org link towards the bottom of the article points to [1] :-)

[1] file:///C:/%5CDocuments%20and%20Settings%5Coyarie%5CLocal%20Settings%5CTemp%5CarXiv.org

Proof: http://imgur.com/p2Qk6gy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com