
Leading mathematician launches arXiv 'overlay' journal - DavidSJ
http://www.nature.com/news/leading-mathematician-launches-arxiv-overlay-journal-1.18351
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toothbrush
This is excellent news. The biggest hurdle for any group of researchers
getting together and doing a journal The Right Way seems to be the notion of
perceived prestige that still clings to Scrooge-journals. Go Gowers!

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davidgerard
The important point is that Gowers was the one who initially stood up and said
"Elsevier delenda est."

(I mean, a lot of us thought it, but he did it really loudly and prominently
as an unimpeachable leader in his field.)

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ColinWright
A link to Gowers' blog post from 17 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197152)

There wasn't much discussion, just 5 comments.

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amelius
It seems to be all about the moderation system. I wonder if there are any
books about moderation systems, describing theory (how to make sure the system
cannot be gamed, how to rank entries, how to rank users, how to ensure
decidability etc.)

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davidgerard
He's deliberately making it extremely conventional in every way except where
the papers are hosted. At this point the game is to gain prestige. Elsevier et
al will have a hard time knocking this one down.

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hugh4
Elsevier et al have so far played very nice with arXiv, for instance by not
demanding that papers submitted to Elsevier journals not appear on it.

Technically the arxiv may right now be illegally hosting many thousands of
papers whose authors actually ticked a box granting exclusive publication
rights to Elsevier. Or any number of other journals. Elsevier benignly
neglects this, but if you really start threatening their business model then
they can make life very difficult for the arXiv.

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nmrm2
If Elsevier tries to kill arxiv, they'll lose a huge fraction of the academic
publishing market.

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hugh4
They certainly will, so this is something that would only happen once Elsevier
is in a death spiral.

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sonium
One intrinsic drawback in the concept of overlay journals is however that is
does not allow for double-blind reviews. Until this is widely implemented I
think the publishing process won't be fair.

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greglindahl
100% of the time that I've done "double blind" reviews, it was easy to guess
what research group the authors were from.

And I've seen reviews where it was easy to guess who the reviewer is: "Paper
fails to cite the seminal work of..."

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devit
Scholastica's practice of charging $10 for each submission seems ridiculous:
if someone submits a million dummy submissions the journal has to ask support
to forgive the charges...

I think that a much better approach would be to require papers to be submitted
as Git pulls adding TeX files, and then use a free code review tool like
Gerrit to do peer review.

That might take a bit more learning than Scholastica, so starting with
Scholastica until the journal is more popular might make sense, but using such
expensive proprietary software doesn't seem to be acceptable long term, and if
a tool works for peer review of code changes, it should work for peer review
of articles as well (maybe with some customization if needed).

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Certhas
Ten dollars is nothing. As others have noted publication charges tend to run
more in the thousands.

And talking of programming tools, like git, and gerrit for academic papers is
completely off base. Most mathematicians will never even have heard of git.

The "free" version is something like what the episcience project is
attempting.

Edit: And as yet others have said, it's crucial, especially in a structurally
very conservative field like mathematics, to stay as close to the conventional
model as possible.

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jimhefferon
> Most mathematicians will never even have heard of git.

Like teenagers who want to listen to their music for nothing, they would learn
overnight.

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imh
This makes it impossible to do blind review (review without knowing who the
author was), which seems desirable. Do existing math journals do blind review?

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crygin
Blind (or double-blind) review in most of academia is inherently impossible --
the people qualified to do the review will generally be able to recognize who
the paper must have come from.

I agree that blinding would be preferable, but when the material itself
reveals the author it's simply not possible.

