Ask HN: ArXiv Endorsement as Independent Researcher
6 points
1 day ago
| 1 comment
| HN
I have a preprint article [1] which I'm trying to get submitted to arXiv's cs.SI (Social and Information Networks) for peer review. As an independent researcher I do not have any affiliations to a university anymore. How do I go about this? Appreciate any kind of info / support.

[1] https://static.philippdubach.com/pdf/Attention_Dynamics_in_Online_Communities_Power_Laws__Preferential_Attachment__and_Early_Success_Prediction_on_Hacker_News.pdf

gus_massa
1 day ago
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> for peer review

ArXiv is not for peer review, it's just for publishing.

I've seen a lot of post from Zenodo, but most of them were bad.

[I have no arXiv account anyway.]

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7777777phil
1 day ago
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> ArXiv is not for peer review, it's just for publishing.

I understand that but unless I publish my preprint somewhere it's hard to submit for review.

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pwlm
1 day ago
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Can you share more about why it's hard to submit the preprint for review unless its first published somewhere? Wouldn't you be able to submit the preprint directly to whichever conference or journal you want it published in?

For a different way to receive feedback for a preprint consider truediffs.com. I created it partly out of frustration for the time it takes to publish smaller work. Although not currently implemented, I can provide a version that keeps review comments private.

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7777777phil
1 day ago
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That’s what I did when I was still at Uni. Unfortunately it’s quite hard without any associations.

How does your platform work in an academic context?

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pwlm
1 day ago
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Finding experts might be hard, but it might not be that hard to find like-minded or curious people. The article got me interested in learning more about the Gini coefficient.

One of the platform's goals is to enable the lightweight version of an academic paper, where you present a claim and evidence and don't need to spin an elaborate story that makes up a full paper. When one isn't that far along in the research they can present what they have so far. Some academics say papers and the review process are too bureaucratic. The key determinant of "acceptance" is whether each sentence written in an article evaluates to true. This means the shorter an article the easier it is to publish. You can learn more in /how.

The platform's content isn't specific to academia. It might turn out that the platform needs to be narrowed down only to academic-like writing or cloned into a version that is only for academic-like writing. Intuition suggests this might be unnecessary or detrimental. That being able to report good results in few and simple words increases discovery velocity. Happy to make changes that increase the platform's ability to find and share novelty.

If the platform fills a need it will survive and if not it should be shutdown.

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gus_massa
1 day ago
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In math and physics, you just upload the pdf to the webpage of the journal and then the editor wisely decides what to do. It's not necesary to upload it elsewhere.
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