
A feature that arXiv should have built years ago - lmessi
https://medium.com/@fermatslibrary/comments-on-arxiv-papers-20d2b048cf92?ref=campaign
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eesmith
FWIW, 13 submissions to this over the last couple of months -
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=20d2b048cf92&sort=byDate&dateR...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=20d2b048cf92&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)
, with different titles and different marketing campaign tags.

The HN guideline suggests preserving the original title, which is "Comments on
arXiv papers".

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Vinnl
Unfortunately, it seems like these comments are only visible to Librarian's
users, which doesn't make it much different from Hypothes.is [1] other than
being limited to arXiv, and makes comments less discoverable. arXiv should
really add such a feature itself/have open sourced its code so they could've
added it there.

[1] [http://hypothes.is/](http://hypothes.is/)

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horsecaptin
It's tricky. Many (most?) researchers would rather have a closed discussion
with other researchers with domain expertise than an open one where they have
to deal with public comments.

~~~
throwawayaway12
I think this is certainly true. Research papers are typically written so that
a person with training in the field can understand and replicate the work.
Note that the general population is not the intended audience. Mediums like
news articles and blog posts are a more effective way of explaining the
background and significance of a certain piece of research to the masses.

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apetresc
A plea to the people behind Fermat's Library - please port the Librarian
extension to Firefox, too! It has full support for the WebExtensions API that
Chrome uses, so porting is usually just a matter of a small tweak to the
manifest.json and re-uploading it to the Mozilla Add-on Gallery.

~~~
slbenfica
Alternatively you can create a bookmark that opens the comments page for every
paper on Firefox. Here's the code:
[https://pastebin.com/4f4YbWvn](https://pastebin.com/4f4YbWvn)

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xioxox
There have been many comment layering systems for arxiv, none of which seem to
have taken off. Also, users are pretty split on whether they want this:
[http://www.nature.com/news/arxiv-preprint-server-plans-
multi...](http://www.nature.com/news/arxiv-preprint-server-plans-multimillion-
dollar-overhaul-1.20181) . Personally I'm not in favour of such a system, as
it's unlikely anyone would spend enough time to write a high quality comment
that won't detract from a paper.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I would love to see the addition of peer reviewed comments. Curation is key,
of course.

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hyperion2010
I will toot the hypothes.is [0] horn again. It is possible (if sometimes
finicky) to use it to annotate pdfs. See for example a demo annotation [1].
The other really cool thing about this is that hypothes.is fingerprints pdfs
and uses a URN to uniquely identify them, so you can annotate a local copy of
a pdf (in the browser) and those annotations will show up on any other copy of
that pdf anywhere on the internet.

0\. [https://hypothes.is/](https://hypothes.is/) 1\.
[https://hyp.is/hZbgFO_ZEeemmt9kojvZIA/arxiv.org/pdf/1712.100...](https://hyp.is/hZbgFO_ZEeemmt9kojvZIA/arxiv.org/pdf/1712.10027.pdf)

