The authors first list some issues with arXiv. Next, they describe how to fix those issues. Then the good news arrives: this improved arXiv already exists. It's called Authorea.com. All three authors are Authorea.com employees. They do disclose it as their affiliation. Still, this is essentially an ad written in LaTeX.
They correctly point out a few of the limitations of arXiv (mostly: static LaTeX and PDFs). But I profoundly dislike the other things they propose:
1. "open comments and reviews". I have no problem with open reviews on a third-party website, but arXiv is literally a "distribution service". It has one job and does it pretty well. I don't want it to turn into Reddit or (worse?) ResearchGate.
2. "alternative metrics". Enough with the metrics already. We all know they're destructive, at least all that have been tried so far. I didn't even know that arXiv showed some bibliometrics (because they are thankfully hidden behind default-disabled switches). Their proposed alternatives? "How many times a paper has been downloaded, tweeted, or blogged." I am not joking, this is what they propose to include in addition to citations. Seriously???
PS: Just a heads-up to anyone who, like me, would be wondering about the ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org link. The article is a regular paper submitted to arXiv. The authors do not belong to the organization maintaining arXiv. The usual link is: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020
The ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org thing is an experimental html5 paper viewer by the arXiv people.
Edit: typos.
> the PDF is not a format fit for sharing, discussing, and reading on the web. PDFs are (mostly) static, 2-dimensional and non-actionable objects. It is not a stretch to say that a PDF is merely a digital photograph of a piece of paper.
It is too far a stretch, murdering the poor subject:
PDFs are the best format available for long-term information, such as research papers. They have the advantages of digital data: Searchable, copy-able, transmittable, and data is extractable. They are also an open format, don't rely on a central service to be available, and they preserve presentation across platforms. They have metadata, and are annotatable and reviewable. And the PDF format is the best for long-term preservation, carefully designed to be readable in 50 years - partly because they preserve presentation across platforms - and that includes the metadata, annotations, and reviews.
PDFs are like paper in that they will look the same 50 years from now as they do today, unlike (almost?) any other digital format.
Yes, I wish they were a bit more dynamic in layout, and that the text was more cleanly extracted.
This is an advertisement for Authorea (which I'd never heard of). I extract two passages that stand out to me.
> What is the single most important factor that has prevented the arXiv to quickly innovate? We believe it is LaTeX. The same technological advancement that has allowed the arXiv to flourish, is also, incredibly, its most important shortcoming. Indeed, the reliance of the arXiv on LaTeX is the source of all the weaknesses listed below.
> The research products hosted by the arXiv are PDFs. A title, abstract, and author list are provided by the authors upon submission as metadata, which is posted alongside the PDF, and is rendered in HTML to aid article discoverability.
It's interesting to me that the authors ignore that it is possible to read the source tex for most papers on the arxiv. The arxiv prefers to be given tex and source files, and then to compile and serve the pdf --- when this is done, you can read the source. In this way the arxiv is a repository of both the plain text source of the document and a formatted output.
In some of my papers, I deliberately include comments or extra data in the source for others. I'm not alone here; I've used the code embedded in this paper [1], for example.
While I think there would be some advantages if the arxiv required all papers to be compilable tex source files, I understand that the arxiv also accepts other formats to not exclude potential writers who do not know tex. [The other formats are pdfs (e.g. converted from Word) or HTML with jpg/png/gif images (which I have never seen in practice)].
"sharing research via PDF must inevitably come to an end."
Maybe instead of using the obsolete toolset arxiv provides, they could host their groundbreaking research on their own platform? The combination of ground breaking features and insightful commentary would draw users?
Actually, many of the negatives they list are positives in my book. The latex barrier screens out a ton of garbage in my view - I'm on some social science / word based research lists, and the quality of stuff is mind bogglingly bad.
Getting stuff it fit into a PDF (instead of the NY times new scrollable story stuff) makes grabbing or print off or even reading easy - less dynamic is good in my book.
This seems... ambitious.
I think ArXiv (edit: Actually this is not by ArXiv, but some other group) is drastically over-estimating the desire to submit papers to their service. They are popular because they host the documents you were going to produce, in the format that the journals expect. The production of a Arxiv appropriate document is a side effect of the actual job, which is writing a paper to submit to a journal (hey, I'm as unhappy as you are that this is the actual job, but everyone hates publish-or-perish, if it could be overthrown it would have been).
"Getting academics to act in a way that is not directly in their self-interest because they just love sharing information" is a usually a pretty safe bet, but I think this would be a bit too far. Unless ArXiv can somehow get journals to expect their format (good luck!) I think this is going to be hard.
Readers may find the Octopus project interesting:
> Designed to replace journals and papers as the place to establish priority and record your work in full detail, Octopus is free to use and publishes all kinds of scientific work, whether it is a hypothesis, a method, data, an analysis or a peer review.
> Publication is instant. Peer review happens openly. All work can be reviewed and rated.
> Your personal page records everything you do and how it is rated by your peers.
> Octopus encourages meritocracy, collaboration and a fast and effective scientific process.
> Created in partnership with the UK Reproducibility Network.
ArXiv has this wonderful property: It works. It‘s simple. Everybody understands it. It is steady. People build tools around it (e.g. arxiv-sanity.com, Google scholar…) which make it even more useful. It has spin-offs like biorxiv that are catered to those communities. It is like a piece of infrastructure. Who cares aboud doi’s when the arxiv URL is already the standard? Yes it has its disadvantages, but none of them seems to justify to me to turn it upside down. Rather one could just add things, slowly, just like they‘re doing it.
I read this article the other day, "There are four schools of thought on reforming peer review" [1] about how there's four schools of thought about how to reform publishing and peer review. Each of them independently are fairly well received and makes sense in itself, at least among my academic circles. However, there are tensions between them, so it's hard to come up with a solution that's universally satisfying to even the majority of stakeholders.
This article about ArXiv is clearly in the "Democracy and Transparency school" as categorized article, but it doesn't yet address the other three camps. The arxiv article proposes machine-readable semantics, easier sharing and discoverability, papers + supplementary materials + reviews all open; this floods the world with even more publications with varying quality, so it's even harder to identify good quality work; and when things can be more easily aggregated by machines and measured with the alternative metrics proposed, it often leads to a more powerful winner-takes-all system that can be gamed (there's now a subtle game of increasing citations that appear on Google Scholar); finally, with an increase in submissions and materials that go along with submissions, it puts an even greater strain on the review system. These problems are not unsolvable, but almost every idea I've seen proposed so far has only been in a single camp, and there's side effects that harm the goals of the other three camps. So I'd love to see more ideas that balance the interests of all four camps that want to reform peer review and publishing.
[1]: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/03/24/th...
@dginev, as you guys upgrade arxiv with HTML5 tech, keep in mind you may be in a position to further implement some of Brett Victor's thinking on "explorable explanations":
http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/
http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/
http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt...
etc.
I don't usually read long articles on my phone but the design of that page on my Pixel 6 was just so perfect! I hope this becomes the norm!
It's fascinating to imagine what the arxiv of the future would look like.
I imagine all scientific publications available on a distrusted block store, including raw emails, data and notes on a voluntary basis.
Stuff that could be published would include reviews, corrections in version control fashion, and enough metadata to model scientific progress.
What this article is describing sounds reasonable but not game changing.
> The arXiv of the future is format-neutral and separates format from content.
Didn't this use to be Latex's tagline? Separate format from content. Which the authors of the article don't find separate enough.
How does the proper separation of format from content even work? Don't you need to markup your content in order for it to become formatted?
One thing I would love to see from the arxiv sites is a publicly available download of an SQLite database. They have a bunch of PDFs, and latex source - but the real killer would be a database with just the text for each section, and then the ability to generate* the pdf, using various different styles. This would save an enormous amount of space, and make things far more tidy. I suppose the images could be stored in the SQLite as blobs, but there's probably a better way with vector dbs or something.
That's what the future will probably look like. With the SQLite decentralized on IPFS or torrent, where only queries get stored on each computer, making more popular queries faster to load (more peers).
*(or maybe an archive of a tons of zstd parquets for each table? - Not sure what the best way to organize several tables in parquet is yet)
At https://42papers.com/ we want to get more folks reading papers our focus in on surfacing papers from arXiv that our community would appreciate so we focus on trending papers, improving readability, etc
A small proposal: why not a PopcornTime of papers? Witch means a distributed network (no matter if BitTorrent, ZeroNet, GNUNet, I2P or something else) to publish? That's the best freedom guarantee and just the mere number of nodes with a paper is a good metric about it's popularity, to avoid oblivion each uni/researcher can easily store and serve their own papers forever: files are small, so download is quick, not much resources are needed.
Original submission: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020
> [Submitted on 20 Sep 2017]
Shouldn't this be "(2017)" - original article was submitted in 2017.
I'm still wandering about a service that would be to arXiv what Github became to Sourceforge. Order of magnitude improvement of collaboration and interconnection between published materials.
[2017]
ssrn is better. no need for endorsements to get stuff published.
They lost me at suggesting that a future ArXiv should be
> Web-native and web-first
Absolutely not. It should be "physical paper first". Any long-term archiving cannot rely on electrical devices for viewing archived material. Electrical grids fail. Technology changes. Even if ArXiv is not a print archive, the material in it must be, first and foremost, printable in a consistent manner, and with the authors targeting the physical printed form. Of course, one would need to actually print ArXiv items to physically archive them, but still.
Now, of course archiving data is useful and important; and large amounts of data are less appropriate for print archiving. But that should always be secondary to the archiving on knowledge.
Related ongoing thread:
Articles from arXiv.org as responsive HTML5 web pages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30835784 - March 2022 (8 comments)