Jim points me to the fact that Nature has a new website call Precedings which is supposed to act like an arxiv for those not lucky enough to be physicists. Oh, and look you can vote for papers 😉 One interesting feature is you can put posters and presentations on the site as well. I’ve always wondered if anyone has tried to submit a pdf of a talk to the arXiv.
O brave new quantum world!
Speaking of presentations, Perimeter is currently developing a system called PIRSA, designed to be an arXiv for video recordings of seminars, conferences, etc. At present it’s just for local talks, but I believe there is an idea to open it up for external submissions once it is sufficiently well-developed and the server space is available. Physics YouTube anyone?
Do you mean a PDF of PowerPoint slides? Because there already are numerous PDFs of talks on the arXiv. But I have never seen a converted PPT. Quick change of subject: Gödel, Escher, Bach just popped up on your “random books from my library.” I have finally started reading it. My father bought a copy when it first came out but never read it (he’s a retired English teacher) and I tried reading his copy a few times in high school but had trouble getting through it. I started it again recently and have whipped through it. Fantastic book (and I’m tempted to try to do the dialogues as a live play sometime). It has given me some ideas regarding my research into the nature of Bell’s inequalities.
Nature Precedings needs to have a good rating system for open, community-based review to work well. Currently, submitted articles can be voted for, but that does not tell one how many would have voted against it. Nor does one get to know the negative points unless they go through the whole article themselves. Such negative points may have been mentioned in some comments but they are not easy to spot. Further, one is usually disinclined to write textual comments unless one has a strong interest to do so.
With open preprint systems, being able to find useful and reliable ideas and data in articles is perhaps more important than being able to submit one. This becomes apparent as the number of articles increase, when searching can return hundreds and thousands of articles. One canￂﾒt go through all of them, and a few ￂﾑbadￂﾒ articles can easily cause frustration and distrust in the quality of the submissions.
But if search criteria can include objective measures of article quality, then one can indeed easily find valuable material. Nature Precedings should therefore opt for a point-based rating system where different aspects of articles can be appraised.
Thus, instead of just letting one vote for an article, one should be allowed to rate its different aspects on, say, a 1-5 scale. Such aspects can include:
1. clarity
2. originality
3. novelty
4. presence and quality of experimental data
5. logical procession
6. depth
7. proper referencing
In effect, this would be a proper peer-review system.
The ratings, both their average and their spread, should be displayed alongside articles.
A good review/rating system will discourage submission of bad articles, build trust in the usability and reliability of content in Nature Precedings, and encourage quality submissions.
(similar comments posted elsewhere on the web by me)