Comment by matthewdgreen

14 hours ago

This sort of thing is really useful for helping people to understand what the purpose of scientific publication is. It's not about presenting finished products to society, it's more like a Discord where you communicate new findings with other authors. Often the reason for a communication is because you found something weird, and you want other people to know about it so they can help you confirm or rule it out as bad data. People shouldn't feel gunshy about this. (My field even has a conference for failed results, CFAIL.) I like to highlight examples of this stuff, because I see so many angry online comments when a paper turns out to be "wrong" or doesn't replicate.

15 comments

matthewdgreen

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stouset  9 hours ago

Yep. Publishing like this gives a heads up to those operating similar observatories to keep an eye out for similar events. And it gives a nudge to theorists that might help them start looking in a more fruitful direction, appropriately caveated that it may be a statistical fluke.

irishcoffee  14 hours ago

You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?

  • EthanHeilman  10 hours ago

    > You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?

    Pre-prints are basically a mailinglist where you post your paper prior to peer review.

    The value over a simple mailinglist is:

    1. Stable URL and citation to enable other work and discussions to cite and reference it.

    2. Versioning of the paper, allowing updates to be made without having mail out the paper, while allowing everyone to find all prior versions

    3. Host for a PDF and data that might be quite large

    4. Centralized searchable long term archive of scientific papers

    5. Scalability, arxiv gets 30,000 submissions a day, no one wants to receive 30,000 PDFs in their inbox everyday

  • ajkjk  14 hours ago

    You think that people's findings should be communicated by email? that their email chains are what should go into the permanent record and be cited and printed out and included in journals and such?

    would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?

  • matthewdgreen  12 hours ago

    If I had the email address of every researcher in my field, I would never send a mass email to them describing my latest goofy idea. I would, however, send my latest goofy idea to a conference with those same reviewers (if I felt it was technically appropriate and correct.)

    • XorNot  10 hours ago

      I mean we use to have newsgroups which basically implemented this.

      Which of course is the point: it is in fact quite similar to a mailing list, just with some extra protocol surounding it to make it manageable.

      So the attempted snark about it up thread is stupid.

  • colechristensen  14 hours ago

    Instead of reading everybody's spam or having to have a centralized body decide who gets to send messages to the mailing list, journal editors filter which things are worthy of publication and in which journal such that readers don't have to wade through garbage or uninteresting results.