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▲ irishcoffee 7 hours ago

You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?

▲EthanHeilman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?

Pre-prints are basically a mailinglist where you post your paper prior to peer review.

The value over a simple mailinglist is:

1. Stable URL and citation to enable other work and discussions to cite and reference it.

2. Versioning of the paper, allowing updates to be made without having mail out the paper, while allowing everyone to find all prior versions

3. Host for a PDF and data that might be quite large

4. Centralized searchable long term archive of scientific papers

5. Scalability, arxiv gets 30,000 submissions a day, no one wants to receive 30,000 PDFs in their inbox everyday

▲gus_massa 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No so wrong. The oldest journals started as smailing list :)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/information-culture/...

▲ajkjk 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You think that people's findings should be communicated by email? that their email chains are what should go into the permanent record and be cited and printed out and included in journals and such?

would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?

▲tomrod 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's how Linux is built.

Science has too many threads to do it successfully though

▲Charon77 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?

Only quote the relevant part and reply to it, just like this very comment.

And Linux has a large mailing archive of various lists and threads that are searchable and available to everyone and get this: free access

▲ajkjk 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

The linux developers' mailing lists are not producing anything like scientific papers...

▲bdamm 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

Kind of arrogant no? Linux kernel development mailing lists are producing something immensely valuable with a much clearer impact on economic indicators than your average scientific paper. Comparing them is hard, but it's patently absurd to say there's nothing being produced compared to scientific papers.

▲ajkjk 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

Dunno who you're arguing with, I didn't say they didn't produce anything of value. I said they aren't producing scientific papers. Conversations are not like papers. The scientists have conversations (sometimes on mailing lists!) as well. The analog to scientific papers in the Linux world are... scientific papers. And the occasional essay on the mailing list, which---get this---would be more valuable to humanity if it was subsequently reproduced as a paper with references and explanations and the like.

(Notwithstanding the absurdity of academic publishing, of course.)

▲matthewdgreen 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If I had the email address of every researcher in my field, I would never send a mass email to them describing my latest goofy idea. I would, however, send my latest goofy idea to a conference with those same reviewers (if I felt it was technically appropriate and correct.)

▲XorNot 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean we use to have newsgroups which basically implemented this.

Which of course is the point: it is in fact quite similar to a mailing list, just with some extra protocol surounding it to make it manageable.

So the attempted snark about it up thread is stupid.

▲colechristensen 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Instead of reading everybody's spam or having to have a centralized body decide who gets to send messages to the mailing list, journal editors filter which things are worthy of publication and in which journal such that readers don't have to wade through garbage or uninteresting results.