
Indian scientists launch preprint repository to boost research quality - sohkamyung
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01082-0
======
statguy
What is the point of a country/province specific arxiv?

~~~
19f191ty
Language is one of the biggest reasons. India, Indonesia and Africa are all
countries with scores of different languages. Some of these are often
languages in which research is conducted and communicated. Having a region
specific preprint server allows people to communicate research in their own
language. Then of course there are region specific research topics that the
global scientific community might not care about.

~~~
fourier_mode
But in India, I haven't seen any higher education research entity using any
language other than English.

~~~
jessriedel
Agreed, but they do mention it on their website:

> The IndiaRxiv repository accepts all the scholarly works in english and all
> the indian languages...

[http://indiarxiv.in/policy/](http://indiarxiv.in/policy/)

------
no_identd
I've found a huge number of highly interesting papers out of India published
in predatory journals. Unfortunately this leads to numerous problems:

Barely anyone learns of them, and those who do have to treat them with extreme
caution, because they lack sane peer review. Here's one example:

[http://www.worldacademicunion.com/journal/1746-7659JIC/jicvo...](http://www.worldacademicunion.com/journal/1746-7659JIC/jicvol12no3paper06.pdf)

The Universal Padovan Code

Really interesting cryptography-related work building on top of
[https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0701085](https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0701085),
extending it from the golden ratio to the only other "morphic number", the
plastic number. (See this recent Numberphile video for an introduction to the
latter:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsGUEj4w9Cc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsGUEj4w9Cc))

And I have tons of additional examples, but this one especially irks me,
because I suspect such a line of research could help with homeomorphic
encryption.

~~~
screye
Asians in general face a major problem of lacking in formal English and
technical writing skills.

Paired with the scarcity of quality mentor grad students (getting into a grad
programs is way easier than getting in into UG programs, the best students
head to other countries ) and massive societal pressures, it is incredibly
difficult to write papers at a tier 1 level.

This leads to students submitting promising but half baked work to predatory
journals/conferences just to get some closure.

Source : submitted promising robotics work to IEEE-IROS. Got praised for the
key innovation, got blasted for shoddy writing and underexperimentation. With
more time it could have been better, but by then it was time to graduate and
head to greener pastures.

------
jessriedel
It's great that they are explicitly recommending that researchers post with a
Share-Alike licence: CC-BY-NC-SA

[http://indiarxiv.in/policy/](http://indiarxiv.in/policy/)

(This would be like Wikipedia, CC BY-SA, except with no commercial use
allowed.)

The arXiv has sadly only recommendee posters use the minimal license:
unlimited distribution, but no modifications allowed. In contrast, a Share-
Alike licence allows researchers to build on each other's _documents_ (e.g.,
review articles) rather than just _ideas_.

------
fourier_mode
IndiaRXiv apparently has a twitter account but no live website yet. Hmph.

~~~
yogeshp
[http://indiarxiv.in/](http://indiarxiv.in/)

