[HN Gopher] Book Review: Making Nature
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       Book Review: Making Nature
        
       Author : nsoonhui
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2022-05-22 10:45 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (astralcodexten.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (astralcodexten.substack.com)
        
       | jimhefferon wrote:
       | Very interesting.
       | 
       | The link to 1971 charts is intriguing. But the link seems to be
       | on a gold standard/Bitcoin web site. Is this a point of
       | conversation among, ahem, boring mainstream economists?
        
       | cs702 wrote:
       | Great read.
       | 
       | Things are already changing, but very slowly and almost
       | imperceptibly if you look at it day-to-day: Public research
       | repositories like arxiv and biorxiv, along with public code
       | repositories like github and gitlab, are becoming or maybe
       | already are the world's most important academic "journals."
       | 
       | All research and code posted on them gets a quick once-over; good
       | work gets the attention it deserves; bad work is quickly ignored.
       | Reviews take place over the Internet via both public and private
       | forums.
       | 
       | Gatekeeping power lies more and more in the hands of a global,
       | distributed scientific community open to anyone willing and
       | capable of doing and reviewing the work. It's fabulous IMHO.
        
         | derbOac wrote:
         | I would love to see stuff like open archives become the
         | standard.
         | 
         | In my experience, I've noticed a few things that are potential
         | problems:
         | 
         | 1. I was surprised by this, but Google seems to delist papers
         | in its search results after a certain amount of time. People
         | have complained about older results vanishing from Google
         | search; this seems to apply to archive papers as well. I wonder
         | if there's space for a dedicated academic search engine
         | (although to be effective, such an engine would have to index
         | regular web sources as well).
         | 
         | 2. People still use peer review as a yardstick, for better or
         | worse. So you'll see something reported in a mainstream
         | journalistic source, with a caveat that it hasn't been peer
         | reviewed yet. It would be nice to have some way of implementing
         | peer review in a more distributed way. There's been a fair
         | amount of thought about this, although it seems like efforts to
         | do so kinda lost steam after archives started taking off; it's
         | almost as if there was a collective "ok we're exhausted and
         | have managed to get archives some traction so we'll just leave
         | that peer-review problem on the table".
         | 
         | 3. It seems like there's some room for other types of archives
         | other than the "-arxiv" sites. I know they have been out there
         | but they've not attracted quite as much attention.
         | 
         | 4. Journals do provide copyediting services; it's a relatively
         | minor thing but professional layout, fonts, and design do
         | improve readability.
         | 
         | I think the second problem is the most pressing, maybe along
         | with the first.
         | 
         | It's a little odd to see a paper in a public repository getting
         | a lot of discussion from experts in the field, approving it
         | essentially, and then it getting treated as second class
         | because it hasn't undergone formal peer-review. Sometimes the
         | blog posts and social media discussions are more thorough than
         | what would ever happen in a formal peer review context. On the
         | other hand, I still think anonymity is important in peer
         | review, and social media hype has its own set of serious
         | problems.
        
           | cs702 wrote:
           | Thank you for the thoughtful comment.
           | 
           | Yes, it would be great to see open archives become the
           | standard. As the OP points out, for most of Nature's history,
           | it did _not_ have any formal peer-review process; Nature was
           | quite literally a _journal_ for sharing new research faster
           | than via publication of a book, which was the previous
           | dominant method for disseminating research. During most of
           | Nature 's history, peer review was something that happened
           | organically, informally, in parallel. For most of its
           | history, Nature was in fact used in much the same way that
           | open archives are used today!
           | 
           | I also agree with you on points 1-4. One possible solution to
           | the problem you raise on point 2 is for the open archives to
           | implement an open peer-review system -- although it's really
           | hard to do that well at scale. (HN moderators nod in
           | agreement.) Hopefully the folks at the various open archives
           | are already thinking about peer review too.
        
       | mindaslab wrote:
       | I think making Sci-Hub should be great book if it's created. It
       | made Science, science, open and accessible to all.
        
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