David_Gerard comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong

113 Post author: lukeprog 09 May 2011 10:05PM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 10 May 2011 09:45:58AM *  2 points [-]

It's ridiculous that wikipedia is more structured and useful that most of the academic literature. I would like to start some kind of academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.

I understand that this is sort of what happens in physics - arXiv preprints (where anything good is expected to be developed into a peer-review-worthy journal article) and a specialist blogosphere. The exchange of prestige and hence the academic credit economy seems to still happen. I suspect the key factor here is arXiv being open-access. So a possible first step is to set up a preprint archive for that field and get the researchers blogging.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 10 May 2011 04:01:53PM *  0 points [-]

So a possible first step is to set up a preprint archive for that field

Arxiv accepts papers in any field. Researchers in medicine, chemistry, etc, just do not use it.

ADDED. Oops, I was wrong. From now on, I'll think more before I hit that "Comment" button. (I still think that setting up a preprint server has already been tried in all academic fields except for those where it was obvious that it would not work. Also, I am pretty sure that arxiv.org tried to extend into computer science but never got a sizeable fraction of the papers in that field.)

Comment author: David_Gerard 11 May 2011 09:53:58AM -1 points [-]

OK, the first step is to get them to use it :-) Why does physics do this but not chemistry?

Comment author: timtyler 11 May 2011 10:06:19AM 4 points [-]

Arxiv accepts papers in any field.

Where are you getting that from? The front page says:

arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics.

Also there is this:

While arXiv serves a variety of scientific communities, not all subjects are currently covered.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 13 May 2011 06:10:22AM 1 point [-]

Point taken.