I’ve been busy all day so just have time to mention an interesting new development to do with arXiv. There is a new site called alphaXiv, which is a forum for anyone to comment line-by-line on arXiv papers. It also allows you to “get responses directly from authors of the paper or from established research teams from Stanford and Harvard”, which seems to imply that authors can’t be from established research teams unless they are from Stanford or Harvard!
Anyway, you can try alphaXiv here.
I think this is a great idea in principle; it will be fascinating to see how it works out in practice. My main reservation stems from (i) it seems that there is no moderation of comments and (ii) anonymous comments are allowed; there is therefore a significant danger of abusive behaviour as is often the case on, e.g., Reddit.
I’d welcome reactions via the comments box below from anyone who has tried this already or who has thoughts about it generally!
