

SciRate: an open source website to browse, save and comment arXiv articles - Link-
https://scirate.com

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YogeeKnows
How to contact the authors and let them know about the comments you have?

E.g. [http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.4006.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.4006.pdf)
section 1.1 should have floor function instead of brackets IMO.

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anonymouz
By email. You can find the address either on the first or the last page of the
article. In this case, it's on the very last page.

Don't bother in this case, the brackets are usual notation for the floor
function.

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YogeeKnows
Thanks. I'm glad my question made you come out of comment hibernation of 214
days :)

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tvawnz
This is something that I had been thinking would greatly benefit the arXiv for
a long time.

Presently, when you do a scientific work, the article goes to a referee who
then sends you back their comments which you account for before resubmitting.
Sometimes you get an excellent referee who really knows his stuff and gives
reasonable comments for improvements. Sometimes you get a guy who really just
can't be bothered who gives minimal comments leading you to wonder if they've
even read it. Sometimes you get an opposing group, which frequently leads to
untenable comments and prompts submission to a different journal.

This is the only feedback you will ever get outside of your coauthors except
the citation count. In my opinion it would be amazing to have some big named
authors who have read your paper drop off advice, what they liked what they
didn't like, etc. At most universities in most groups you do "journal club"
once a week where you discuss others' papers and produce this exact feedback,
but there's no forum to post it in, so it just stays in the journal club.

However, just as abuse on arXiv led to the transformation to an invitation
only site (I forget if you need an invite or just a university sponsored
email; see also vixra.com), the community on a site like this _should require
your real identity_.

It could be devastating to a young researcher to have their work publicly
shamed by an anonymous commenter who has it out for their research group. But
if the comments are linked to real identities, I think the community will
police itself... Although there are frequently unofficial "response to... "
articles on the arXiv, they are publicly attached to other research groups,
and you will sometimes see "response to response to ..." letters.

It's interesting to see these sort of 2010 things popping up amongst our 1990s
bastion websites like arxiv and ADS and such (see researchgate, the facebook
of scientists). But frequently they kind of seem to fall victim to the same
downfalls of their non-scientific counterparts ("cite" is the equivalent of
"like" on researchgate to improve your "profile impact" metric so you
frequently get people acting needy about "citation requests" even though we
have our own metrics like Hirsch Indeces to measure scientific productiveness
in an objective way).

TLDR; I worry that a comment based website could host troll-like behavior
which could be especially harmful when the whole premise is people's
professional work. This is one of the few places on the internet where I think
real names must be required and institutional affiliation should be provided
(as is the case with arXiv). As it is I signed up with a BS name and email in
5 seconds and can immediately start trashing this paper on quantum physics
that I know nothing about.

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sktrdie
Actually, as a young researcher, I find the complete opposite. Sites like
researchgate or facebook or any other "comment-ie" thing is sort of
superficial in the sense that even though you might get some comments, they're
usually quite minimal and bad. On the other hand, reviewers for
conferences/journals are sort of obliged to put time into it and dedicate to
give you a proper review and most reviews I've received are of very high
quality.

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mispy
The comments SciRate gets at the moment are pretty decent, I think because
people mostly just integrate it into their existing review process.
[https://scirate.com/arxiv/1501.07071](https://scirate.com/arxiv/1501.07071)
is a good example. If the community were to grow though we'd definitely want
heavy moderation.

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tvawnz
That does look like a refreshing exchange. The pessimist in me thinks it's a
pretty optimal "showcase" example though :P

On a related note, don't some fields/journals (like pharmacology is in my head
for some reason) require ref reports to be made public?

