Talk:ArXiv

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Contents 1 What's in a Name 2 License 3 XXX 4 Incorrect Title 5 Template? 6 Perelman and Arenstorf 7 Why this strange name? 8 Children's Internet Protection Act 9 is it true that most papers on the arXiv get published elsewhere? 10 Archive Freedom 11 External links 12 Does Arxiv provide any economic benefits?

[edit] What's in a Name

anyonhe know how the name arXiv came about? I'm guessing its a pun on 'archive' with X coming from the old 'xxx' name? But why no 'e' on the end?

Their FAQ says "no reason" for both "why arXiv.org?" and "why xxx.lanl.gov?". HTH. -- ALoan (Talk) 12:02, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] License

Question: can arXiv.org be described as open content? What is the licence or other conditions that arXiv materials are released under?

I do not know about the licencing, but this question does rather not occur in most uses of the medium, where people want to learn information, but not modify or redistribute it. I think that (i) authors will generally agree to redistribution of their works, and (ii) authors reserve the right to remove their work from the public domain (which could for example be needed when an article appeared in a journal that forces the author to do this [sadly this already occured -- John Baez discusses such issues on his homepage], in which case the author will hopefully no longer submit to or referee for this journal). ArXiv certainly is part of the Open access movement -- I will add a link. --Markus Krötzsch 00:54, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] XXX

The following paragraph currently in the article is wrong:

arXiv.org was formerly known as xxx.lanl.gov but it changed its name when it was found that censorware programs were blocking access to it from various sites, under the impression that the three letters 'X' in its name implied that it was a pornographic site. The idea of XXX was that it was one better than WWW in every way.

XXX was chosen by Paul Ginsparg as a joke to try to get the site and it's emails blocked. See http://arxiv.org/help/faq/skullfaq for more info.

Also, the entire article is slanted towards mathematics, and there's no mention of the nlin category (non-linear sciences).

arXiv surpassed 300,000 papers in November 2004.

I'd make the changes myself, but I work for the arXiv, and thought that it could be a conflict of interest. So I'll let someone else in the community edit the page as a buffer between my POV and the the NPOV of the article. ktheory 18:58, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I updated the article count and added a mention of the nlin category. The FAQ (http://arxiv.org/help/faq/skullfaq) you are pointing to is entirely unconvincing. I can't help with the slant towards maths, as I am a mathematician myself, but feel free to edit (I think the conflict of interest is no problem once you have declared it). -- Jitse Niesen 17:51, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Incorrect Title

Why not just move the title to "arXiv.org e-print archive" I dont think that theres any limitation.

MediaWiki capitalises the first letter of article names. That is why iPod is at IPod. The reason for this is so that there is no need to worry about the case of something when linking it ie you can talk about "how fast the car went" and also that "Cars can go fast". Both links go to the same place. 132.181.7.1 00:41, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Template?

Is there a template for arxiv referencing? --Staecker 15:30, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

The template {{arxiv}} can be used inside a larger reference. For example {{arxiv|archive=hep-th|id=0203101}} creates arXiv:hep-th/0203101. This can be used in the ID field of templates such as {{Journal reference}}. -- Fropuff 02:46, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Perelman and Arenstorf

Hi, so what did Perelman and Arenstorf do in 2002 and 2004? (sorry - you've got a physicist here). Did they keep doing it afterwards, or were they one-off events? Just asking because the passage in the article read oddly. I've changed it somewhat, but someone who kows had better check I haven't stuffed up the meaning. More detailed explanation wouldn't go awry, either ;-) Deuar 16:30, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why this strange name?

Why does this article have such a strange name? JSTOR is in JSTOR, so why not put this in ArXiv or ArXiv.org? Loom91 11:27, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

It is strange and I have no answer except to say it should be moved to arXiv. There are already a number of redirects from that page and I suspect the only reason there is a large number of links to arXiv.org e-print archive is because people have been fixing the redirects. --C S (Talk) 19:33, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Children's Internet Protection Act

"It is sometimes claimed that some censorware programs were preventing some users from accessing it at its previous address, xxx.lanl.gov, under the impression that the XXX in its name implied that it was a pornographic site; however, this is believed to be untrue: private internet service providers would not be financially viable if they blocked access to such sites."

This is true for residential ISPs. However, arXiv contains scholarly works that are intended in part to be useful to students accessing the web through a school ISP. In the United States and possibly other jurisdictions, internal ISPs run by the IT departments of public schools (both K-12 and university) and public libraries are required by law to use censorware on student-accessible machines, or they will lose funding. (See Children's Internet Protection Act and foreign counterparts.) Here, censorware increases financial viability. As for private schools, socially conservative parents are likely to send their children to schools that take steps to protect their children from pornography. --Damian Yerrick (☎) 22:04, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] is it true that most papers on the arXiv get published elsewhere?

That little bit of text (currently "some small fraction of work remaining purely as e-prints and not published in peer-reviewed journals") gets quite a bit of editing attention. Does anyone have any evidence for this statement? My impression would be that to the contrary quite a lot of stuff put on the arXiv, perhaps even a majority, never gets published in a peer-reviewed journal. Does anyone have any numbers for this? Dmharvey 12:29, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Sigh, for now, I'm going to change it to say "some" instead of "some small fraction", "some minority", etc. It's demonstrably true and verifiable that the vague "some" is correct. I don't believe there is any data from a verifiable source (in the sense of WP:Verifiability) that supports the other statements.

As for your impression, I guess it depends on where you look. Deuar and I have discussed this, and our impressions is that in our own specialties (mine is primarily math.GT), about 10% remain unpublished, with the rest getting published within a few years after submission. --C S (Talk) 16:38, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I changed it to "some", but to make it more interesting (instead of almost a vacuous statement), I added that this includes even "very influential papers". I didn't find it necessary to cite this as there are, I think, enough examples, but if someone objects, one example is William Thurston and several of his preprints. Some of them were to be published in the Annals of Mathematics, but never were. They are are heavily cited. --C S (Talk) 16:46, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Looks much better to me now. Dmharvey 16:49, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

My problem with adding this is that it makes arXiv sound even more reliable. The article currently doesn't say anything about the papers not being peer reviewed, nor does it say anything about the inclusion of papers by various crackpots (the late Caroline Thompson, for example). I'm not sure how much of a problem this is outside Wikipedia, but people inside Wikipedia often try to mislead unknowing editors by giving references to such papers on arXiv. I would add this, but I am unsure of how to do so in an unbiased and elegant manner. --Philosophus ^T 19:50, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Good point - this wasn't mentioned in the article. I've made an attempt, hopefully reasonably unbiased. Deuar 19:58, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

I believe that Deuar's attempt to clarify the raised concerns has caused bigger problems. The edit basically consists mostly of opinion, albeit informed opinion. I don't believe it adheres to either WP:NPOV or WP:Verifiability. If the concern is that the article does not mention explicitly it is not peer-reviewed (although it is implicit in the second sentence), we can just say that. We don't need to explain why this unreviewed eprint archive may not be as reliable as a peer-reviewed medium, or how certain articles may be reliable given certain conditions. Let's just stick with the facts and explain the whole idea of journal overlays (a major way refereed papers get on arXiv), endorsements, and so forth. Those are important pertinent issues and can easily be explained in a neutral manner. --C S (Talk) 16:23, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, true, I just wrote thoughts that occured to me from experience. I'm not sure which parts you consider non-neutral but feel free to improve it! Deuar 18:26, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

While the text that you removed was somewhat opinionated, the new version doesn't mention the problems at all. It should be easy to cite a crank paper or two in arXiv, and mention that there are such papers there. --Philosophus ^T 01:02, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree that it should be mentioned as it is one of the things which pops up very frequently in discussions about the arXiv. I tried to find a neutral formulation, supported by a reference. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 02:28, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Jitse, your edit falsely implies that the endorsement system has to do with ensuring correctness. As my edit should have made clear, the endorsement is NOT to ensure correctness but only that the submissions are appropriate and relevant to the research going on in the specified areas; also, for some reason, the comment in the first paragraph about the papers being eventually published is repeated (with the unverifiable "most"). I note that the Jackson article explicitly mentions the lack of statistics about which percentage of eprints gets published (while mentioning one informal test of 100 papers in hep-th by Kuperberg). It does mention that a majority of papers are submitted for publication though.

I will change it back to be correct, while keeping your citation and modifying your comment about the concerns, as the article doesn't quite make the point I believe you want, Jitse. The Jackson article mentions that people that use the arXiv are not concerned by the lack of peer-review, and that "junk", crank-type papers are actually infrequent. So while we could mention as Philosophus suggests, that such papers do exist on the arXiv, we would need to mention their rarity.

Anyway, I've edited based on these comments. --C S (Talk) 05:34, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

1. "Jitse, your edit falsely implies that the endorsement system has to do with ensuring correctness." — Yes, my formulation was sloppy, sorry.
2. "the comment in the first paragraph about the papers being eventually published is repeated" — My plan was to remove it from the first paragraph, but I forgot that. I think it is logical to put the facts "some papers are not published in peer-reviewed journal" and "the majority are" next to each other. I edited to this effect.
3. "the article doesn't quite make the point I believe you want" — I think it is just that I was not very clear in expressing what I had in mind. I agree with your edits, modulo details.

I do have the impression that the endorsement system was put in place as an (incomplete) replacement for peer-review (but, working in one of the areas that does not use the arXiv much, I may well be wrong). For that reason, I put the "problems with no peer review" paragraph before the paragraph describing the endorsement system. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 06:11, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by incomplete replacement, but it's never appeared to me that the endorsing was designed to be anything more than a very minimal barrier to keep out incredibly ridiculous papers, in order to minimize "cruft" buildup and reduce workload for those working for the arXiv. The requirements to be an endorser are fairly lax, and if you really wanted to, I'm sure you could find someone to endorse your latest proof of Fermat's Last Theorem :-) My impression is that endorsement is designed to keep out some of the cranks, but it certainly was never meant to seriously reduce the number of errors in papers on the arXiv. Anyway, the new order is fine, as it does suggest the right things. --C S (Talk) 07:06, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

The recent edits look like a fine piece of work to me. Deuar 14:25, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Archive Freedom

The website http://archivefreedom.org/ is critical of arXiv claiming that it operates a blacklist. At least one of the people mentioned Dr. Peter Rowlands is a university lecture in a physic department which has been given the top rating for research in the UK (5A). The transcript [1] indicates this is not just obvious cranks being excluded.

Normally I would not think of including such a site in wikipedia, but it does seem on topic for this article. --Salix alba (talk) 21:52, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't think anyone has disputed this should belong, which is why it has remained :-) So I'm a little puzzled as to what brought on this comment. --C S (Talk) 01:00, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

My mistake, it was mention on Talk:Pseudoscience, I quickly scanned this article but did not notice it, at the end of a paragraph. --Salix alba (talk) 10:43, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi, can someone cite the exact paragraph in Talk:Pseudoscience that deals with the exclusion of honorable scientists ?

By the way: there lies an (hopefully;) ) unintended sarcasm in the fact that if someone seeks information about archive freedom they get all kinds of results, but archivefreedom.org is (at least) not on the first three pages (although it starts with an a). What is even worse, is if someone writes archivefreedom as one word, the sole result is Pseudoscience ! This suggests archivefreedom = Pseudoscience, which I believe no one here intended . Phi0618 (talk) 11:26, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, someone took care of the archivefreedom result, it now shows no results.

I'm going to make my first edit, just a mention of archivefreedom in the title of the section that deals with it. Phi0618 (talk) 13:24, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

The balancing mention of possible blacklisting was deleted by a non registered user. I would therefore like to encourage a discussion and vote by other Wiki's on the subject. Phi0618 (talk) 16:39, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I just noticed C S 's comment that no one disputed it should belong, so I'll boldly put it back in, justified by the fact that every statetment can be found in the reference. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Phi0618 (talk • contribs) 16:45, 22 November 2007 (UTC) Phi0618 (talk) 19:11, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Also,, there is another kind of 'censorship' you cannot publish papers on Arxiv if you do not have an academic affiliation to an University no matter if your paper is correct or not --85.85.100.144 (talk) 13:17, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] External links

Most of the external links should be made into references cited in an appropriate place in the text. Jmath666 17:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Does Arxiv provide any economic benefits?

Given the time and effort that authors will go to in order to publish or create the results which they then go onto publish in certain peer-reviewed journals, together with those papers which they place on Arxiv, are there some economic mechanics behind ArXiv?

Are there plans for some type of incentive system which would enable ArXiv members to benefit or profit from the work that they publish? It would seem common sensical that work which might have practical application for economic betterment (whilst also being of a mathematical nature) would be well suited to presentation on an ArXiv equivalent site (assuming, of course, that we would like to keep ArXiv itself open source and free for all). Prizes could then be given to economically beneficial papers - or papers could be recommended in some way.

It would seem to me that much of the ArXiv information could find application to various uses – and hence that it should be possible to relate at least some ArXiv articles to some type of economic value (sorry if this brings ideas of impact factors to mind).

CountNihilismus 23:01, 8 November 2007 (UTC)