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?
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.)
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.
> 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
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?
That's how Linux is built.
Science has too many threads to do it successfully though
> would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?
Only quote the relevant part and reply to it, just like this very comment.
And Linux has a large mailing archive of various lists and threads that are searchable and available to everyone and get this: free access
4 replies →
No so wrong. The oldest journals started as smailing list :)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/information-culture/...
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.)
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.
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.