Marginalium

Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science. This is paywalled, so use your favourite paywall buster. A hit on academic publishers and a nod to the direction science is going.

Every industry has certain problems universally acknowledged as broken: insurance in health care, licensing in music, standardized testing in education, tipping in the restaurant business. In academia, it’s publishing. Academic publishing is dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer. Calling their practice a form of thuggery isn’t so much an insult as an economic observation. Imagine if a book publisher demanded that authors write books for free and, instead of employing in-house editors, relied on other authors to edit those books, also for free. And not only that: The final product was then sold at prohibitively expensive prices to ordinary readers, and institutions were forced to pay exorbitant fees for access.
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While arXiv submissions aren’t peer-reviewed, they are moderated by experts in each field, who volunteer their time to ensure that submissions meet basic academic standards and follow arXiv’s guidelines: original research only, no falsified data, sufficiently neutral language. Submissions also undergo automated checks for baseline quality control. Without these, pseudoscientific papers and amateur work would flood the platform.

It’s science, but faster. And it seems fortunate that AI is coming into play, because actually, although it makes access better, it’s difficult to wade through the content to find the information. Indeed, as the author points out, arXiv isn’t “a frictionless utopia of open-access knowledge”. It’s just a new way of doing things.