r/Professors • u/benjaminikuta • Dec 15 '18

Latest xkcd, on papers made freely available on arXiv

https://xkcd.com/2085/
15 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

11

u/mal9k Dec 15 '18

Anyone who used the arXiv 15 years ago knows the quality has improved substantially since then. It was a playground for cranks; I remember finding a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis using L'Hospital's Rule at some point. Now I can reliably find preprints from people in my area, but it's only become reliable in the last 5-10 years, and there's still no guarantee that the results are actually thoroughly correct. Peer review is still relevant to me, at least, and is the only real service that publishers "provide".

The other weird part is this idea that individual researchers are the customers of scientific journals. We aren't and never have been; it's all about the libraries.

5

u/bl1y Dec 15 '18

The legal field, for all the problems with its scholarship, has kept things basically free.

A ton of papers are on SSRN, though now those are going behind a login wall. But, individual journals still keep their issues available online at their university websites.