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Comment by odyssey7

14 hours ago

The pace of things is moving along so rapidly right now, I’m not sure that waiting for peer reviews is always a wise move. Doubly so if there’s a paywall; why limit your article’s impact by placing it where practitioners’ agents might not be able to access it? The rapid progress right now is challenging for conventional academic processes.

If the value of the paper is difficult to independently verify, for example, if it depends on the credibility of the author, then the academic ritual can add something. If it’s a mathematical result, one that can be automatically verified, or a machine learning technique that anyone can try with Claude code reconstructing it for them, this sort of pre-print publishing model is advantageous.

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odyssey7

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rhelz  13 hours ago

// why limit your article's impact //

Because...science? It's not science until it passes peer review.

I'm not advocating that everybody stops posting to arXiv, and I'm not saying you can't find good stuff there. I'm just saying, it's a vanity press, there is absolutely no guarantee of the paper's quality.

And being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee. If we've learned anything from the non-reproducibility crisis, it is that a paper's origin story is no guarantee.

  • raattgift  9 minutes ago

    > It's not science until it passes peer review

    Peer reviewers don't generally reproduce the work in the publications they are asked to review, at least not during the review process itself. Neither do journal editors.

    If you want a real vanity press, check vixra and its origin story.

    ArXiv does have moderators and endorsers in each area, although they are usually light-touch, weeding out literally unreadable submissions, ones that so obviously ignore formatting guidelines that it beggars belief they could comply with a typical journal's rules, and ones that are clearly submitted to the wrong area.

    If anything, I think sometimes the net is too fine. Will Kinney just this week had a version of <https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~whkinney/SpecialRelativityBoot...> rejected by the arXiv, for example. The reasons for arXiv-rejection can be opaque.

    Having a stable document early (a pre-print) tends to widen the scrutiny of papers that may ultimately be published to a journal whose editor's expertise lies in a very different area from the submission; this can and does lead to author corrections being made before journal publication.

    There are plenty of peer-reviewed papers which are hot garbage that have found their way into prestigious high-impact journals like Nature and Science (see <https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...> for examples, and note none of the top 10 are in areas covered by the arXiv).

    > being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee

    Everyone in academia knows this, including the vast majority of famous professors from prestigious universities, because of online repositories like <https://retractionwatch.com/retractions-by-nobel-prize-winne...> (and much more sadly because of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>, lower-profile versions of which academic paper-writers -- and dissertation writers -- tend to encounter as they chase the history of the problem before them or read late citations to works they are relying upon). This particular part of your set of claims is is not a real problem in academia or with the arXiv in particular.

    Finally, what value does publication in a predatory journal bring? Do you believe that peer review and editing were actually even performed in the majority of MDPI's most predatory journals, for example? <https://www.predatoryjournals.org/news/list-of-all-mdpi-pred...> Some papers published in some of their pay-for-publication open access journals don't even get submitted to the arXiv; one might hope this is out of embarrassment by the authors, although the (low) bar set by the arXiv itself is certainly a factor.

    The remedy for a reasonably argued but wrong academic paper isn't lack of publication, failed peer review, or editorial alteration, but rather reply papers. That's the academic dialogue.

  • anon48293  9 hours ago

    Then again neither is peer review. Reproducing research is the only way to prove reproducibility and thereby lend credibility to the claims.