Back when I first mentioned the idea, people were kind of down on the idea of SciRate.com, Dave Bacon's project to make a collaborative filter for the arxiv.org prerprint server. Not one to be easily discouraged, Dave has continued to work on it, and it now features papers from all the different arxiv categories, instead of just quant-ph.
If you've been sitting around thinking "Gee, I wish there were a Digg for hep-th, well, today's you're lucky day. If you haven't, well, umm... Look over there! Shiny thing!
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Some news for those interested in open-source publishing and "Open Science": Dave Bacon is announcing the debut of scirate.com, a sort of social-networking site for physics preprints:
The idea came from the observation that while the arxiv is a amazing tool, one of the problems was that the volume…
There's been a lot written recently about academic publishing, in the kerfuffle over the "Research Works Act"-- John's roundup should keep you in reading material for a good while. This has led some people to decide to boycott Elsevier, including Aram Harrow of the Quantum Vatican. I'm generally in…
Sorry for the ridiculously slow pace around here lately; I've been
ridiculously busy. I'm changing projects at work; it's the end of the school
year for my kids; and I'm getting close to the end-game for my book. Between
all of those, I just haven't had much time for blogging lately.
Anyway... I…
There's a kerfuffle in the physics blogosphere these days over the somewhat arcane issue of TrackBacks to posts on the ArXiV, the commual preprint server where researchers can post drafts of the papers that they have submitted to research journals (or, if they're working in high energy physics,…
Shame if it leads to people overlooking less fashionable papers because they don't get rated highly by enough people.
I also think it would be a shame if less fashionable papers are overlooked because of something like this. However my experience so far has been exactly the opposite in that paper that I normally wouldn't have read, I've ended up reading because people I respect voted or them.
I'm also a bit curious about how often "real" results get overlooked. Maybe I'm just naive because I've got blinders on in a particularly narrow field, but my impression is rarely that this happens. And I do read voraciously. I wonder how you would test this :)
There are lots of questions I'd have about the preprints and how they are read (or not), that would be interesting to research on. Basically, I guess, what are the common internal sorting algorithms that people run, when looking at the preprints list, how they filter what to read based on title, author, hearing from other people plus, of course, seeing what papers cite your own and scanning them, that sort of stuff.
Not to mention other essential components such as:
if (author == Werner)
{
int days = 3;
backside.sit(officeChair);
eyes.read(days, hands.fetchMathBooks("all"));
selfEsteem--;
}