It’s good for getting free access to preprints which are often close enough to the paywalled real papers in journals. If I find a paper I want (or more realistically, if ChatGPT finds a paper it wants for me), but it’s behind a paywall, odds are the authors put a preprint on arXiv.

Some researchers and journals publish peer-reviewed work on arxiv; it serves as a stable archive that won't be plagued by link rot or paywalls.

Often they are extended versions of the journal articles and contain valuable material that had to be cut for space limits.

The preprint papers on arXiv are like 99% the same as the published versions, except they're free instead of locked behind a multi-thousand dollar/year paywall.

I don't think you fully understand the problem. It doesn't matter if you can find in arxiv a preprint of an article published on a reputable journal. What matters is that right besides that paper you will find a dozen other papers that can be utter nonsense generated by a poorly calibrated slop factory. You don't find those in papers published in respectable journals which enforce double blind peer review and were filtered for relevance and quality.

It's that peer review process that creates value and relevance. Otherwise all you have is a glorified file server.

Either you setup feeds for the specific topics/subjects you care about, scan what you come across once a week, or you use it to get access to papers that are usually behind some paywall. I don't think the intention nor the value comes from just haphazardously reading through everything in some section.

It's not peer-reviewed and supposed to free and accessible from both sides so the results kind of makes sense.

A free-to-read PDF host site is valuable enough. Most academic publishers have a pay wall.

My take: if not for arxiv and huggingface, the field of ML would be nowhere near where it is today.

More to your question, I recommend something like semanticscholar to find actual relevant papers. Try to identify researchers that seem trustworthy, then explore the citation network around them.

For more hot off the press stuff, follow what gets boosted on social media.

Still doesn’t cover the truly niche stuff but it’s a start

I think this is more of a systematic issue. I review now since 2-3 years, I do not get paid, which is fine. However, it takes always a huge amount of time without really having anything from it, but I do it because it is important work.

There now so many researcher that need to publish which explains the flooding, LLM only speed it up, so reciprocal reviews take place. So now you are forced to review and you are having less and less time. So it’s a natural choice for you if you already took an LLM to write a paper to use it to review.

Perhaps one solution would be much harder entry barriers, and enforcing some guidelines. For example that a supervisor can not have more than 5 papers and PhD students only need one real paper on a major conference/journal.

Oh my god that was just written at the beginning of August?? It feels like I read it a year ago. We really are speed running this tech cycle…

You’d better not look at the average CI pipeline in software shops then

I think we underestimate the psychology of this kind of use of LLMs. I don't think these people (students, academics, lawyers, etc etc etc) are all just lazy morons. I think that using an LLM gives a strong knee-jerk feeling of "OMG this is exactly what I have to say. This is MY idea, these are my thoughts, this is - in a real sense - MY writing!" The feeling floods you when you see the output being churned out, way before you you read the thing (if you ever do) - it's the initial *seeing* it. Then when you hand the generated text in, unread by you, you do not have the feeling of cheating, you have the feeling of having exercised your powers, pushed right to the edge of your expertise and thoughtfulness, you successfully overcame obstacles because of your experience and unique capabilities.

This is not always the psychological situation, but I think it might be a lot of the time.

I also think that until we recognize this, we won't be able to help people to not do it. Calling them lazy or being bewildered by them or feeling rage or contempt towards them or threatening them is not going to be practically helpful.

I half agree. It used to be good, they called them "preprints" because they were already sent to a journal and somewhat expected to be accepted. Until people noticed that they were not forced to publish the "preprint" later so it got flooded with crap, hand crafted artisanal crap.

Unless you are working in the area of the paper AND know the reputation of the authors AND take a deep look, just give it the same credibility than to a random PDF posted in WordPress. They have some weak filtering because to post in the arXiv someone must vouch for you or something similar, but it's a very weak filter and people was already abusing it.

And then the AI slop truck hit...

the AI reaearchers who got their careers started on arxiv should chip in to support the site

They are, if their institution does not have contracts for that specific domain from Elsevier et al.

At my institute we for example do not have access to parts of Springer.

Luckily, more and more is moving towards open access.

How is science to evolve if good research requires $49 a pop to view?

This kind of criticism is misplaced. The answer to reputable journals being held hostage by the likes of Elsevier is not dropping peer review and dump articles in a blog-like site such as Arxiv.

I'm confident the bulk of academia would love to move away from Elsevier et al and have free open journals as their discourse venue. However, the publish or perish situation created pressure to count only the papers published in reference publications in their productivity metrics, and those were hijacked by for-profit editorial companies which unscrupulously abuse their dominant entrenched position.

And publishing on Arxiv does not change that.

Published

Posted. Having a preprint on arxiv is not publishing.

One is immutable with a DOI.

Without arXiv we'd have had a blog post and nothing citable.

Arxiv is a blog. Your paper is a blog post which is just as citable and as peer reviewed as blogspot.

This comment is one of the most bizzare things I've seen here regarding ArXiv.

Did we completely write off the "web of trust" as a workable system? Where you exchange keys with people and co-sign each others keys and then trust keys signed by them. This would be an alt to "algorithms" and also a way to "subscribe" to things that got vetted by trusted people or orgs. I kind of do this with uBlock Origin, where they curate a (very complex) list of ads (but without the key signing). Orgs could vet and publish lists of arXiv papers and I'd be subscribed to that. This could also be the source of my social media feed (friends of friends, etc).

I remember in the early days of PGP this was put forward as a vision. I remember the various key-holding systems (that were hard to use). I did a key-party with my brother and his friend in the '90s.

Why did this fail?