> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, ...

In my experience as a publishing scientist, this is partly because publishing with "reputable" journals is an increasingly onerous process, with exorbitant fees, enshittified UIs, and useless reviews. The alternative is to upload to arXiv and move on with your life.

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groundzeros2015 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s true. But that’s separate than the use in ML in Blockchain circles as a form of a marketing - using academic appearances.

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StableAlkyne an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Every field and every publisher has this issue though.

I've read papers in the chemical literature that were clearly thinly veiled case studies for whatever instrument or software the authors were selling. Hell, I've read papers that had interesting results, only to dig into the math and find something fundamentally wrong. The worst was an incorrect CFD equation that I traced through a telephone game of 4 papers only to find something to the effect of "We speculate adding $term may improve accuracy, but we have not extensively tested this"

Just because something passed peer review does not make it a good paper. It just means somebody* looked at it and didn't find any obvious problems.

If you are engaged in research, or in a position where you're using the scientific literature, it is vital that you read every paper with a critical lens. Contrary to popular belief, the literature isn't a stone tablet sent from God. It's messy and filled with contradictory ideas.

*Usually it's actually one of their grad students

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jjk166 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That sounds more like an issue of certain fields having crappy standards because the people in those fields benefit from crappy standards than an issue with the site they happen to host papers on.

	▲	groundzeros2015 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don’t buy “some fields are just more honorable”. Everyone uses publishing for personal gain. But yes it’s a people problem, not an arxiv problem.
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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