arxiv.org is perhaps the only successfully community to come out of academia and it was successful precisely because it wasn't funded... all of the early work was done on stolen time so there was no BS having to do with grants, etc.
Back when I was involved with arxiv.org we had 1/8 the budget of some people next door who'd build a huge portal that had essentially no end users. Perhaps we could have done so much more if we'd had more money, but practice shows that academics will eat the money up and deliver very little for it.
Hi Paul,
I'm a researcher who uses arxiv daily and I love it. I love it to the point that I sometimes wonder if it could become more than it is. Did anyone involved with arxiv ever toy with the idea of attaching message boards to papers in which the papers could be discussed? i.e. One of the links from the abstract page could be to a message board specifically for discussing that paper.
One of the worst things about the peer review process at journals is the lag and one-way nature of communication between authors and referees. It is tremendously frustrating to have one referee torpedo the whole process because he/she has interpreted the paper incorrectly. I'd love to see somebody try to replace the traditional referee process with something like an invitation-only forum so that authors and referees can interact in a timely basis with anonymity preserved. Arxiv could do a variation of this by creating a forum open to users who have published papers on the arxiv (just to weed out spammers). This could provide rapid feedback to strengthen papers as well as a place to collect answers to questions from readers.
(1) arXiv.org is amazingly successfully because people use it and love it. However, the low funding of arXiv.org also means that arXiv.org has missed many opportunities. Had we gotten 4x the funding we got, and spent it well, we might have come to dominate several more academic fields and we could have launched some awesome features.
(2) I think we could have solved the problem of "non-scientists" commenting, but there's also the problem that the physics community is very snarky. What if, say, a grad student writing his first paper gets a really nasty comment by one of the luminaries in the field? We didn't want to get involved in all the suffering that would have entailed.
You're totally right about the ineffectiveness of peer review and that was a subject that we talked about a lot. Some service for giving feedback to papers and evaluating their significance could have been a great help. Yet, a serious investigation of this could reveal that many of the assumptions about how science works may be wrong.
For instance, we found that by far, the papers on arXiv.org that are of most enduring interest are review papers. Like the U.S. patent system, scientific publishing fetishizes being the first to do something, not the first to do it right. Similarly, the idea of "reproduction" is core to what people say the scientific method is, but almost no scientific results are reproduced and many or most would not be reproducable if somebody tried.
Remember, despite peer review, the median scientific paper is wrong.
I totally agree with you and congratulations on creating such a widely used and transformative product, I hope that in time biology will also adopt the arXiv model.
I've been working on a new front-end for the arXiv (www.marxiv.org) that is built for for the modern web, focusing on speed, simplicity, mobile accessibility, social sharing, and (coming soon) the ability to log in and keep a synchronized list of saved articles, favorite searches, etc., across computers/mobile devices. This is all made possible by the arXiv's awesome committment to OAI. In case anyone tries it out (still in beta), we'd love to hear your feedback. No grants involved! ;)
Back when I was involved with arxiv.org we had 1/8 the budget of some people next door who'd build a huge portal that had essentially no end users. Perhaps we could have done so much more if we'd had more money, but practice shows that academics will eat the money up and deliver very little for it.