<story><title>A Reboot of the Legendary Physics Site ArXiv Could Shape Open Science</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/05/legendary-sites-reboot-shape-future-open-science/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>charles_dickens</author><text>Interesting to see their approach and the reasons why they are not building more features on top of ArXiv. Although comments on papers might be a dangerous area to venture into there are definitely places on the web where the ability to annotate and comment papers is helping science move forward. A good example is the Polymath project and Terry Tao&amp;#x27;s blog. Tao&amp;#x27;s recent solution to the Erdos discrepancy problem,an 80-year-old number theory problem, was actually triggered by a comment on his blog. Another example is www.fermatslibrary.com. Although the papers in the platform are more historical&amp;#x2F;foundational, they were able to get consistently good&amp;#x2F;constructive comments that help people understand papers better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>egjerlow</author><text>Would you elaborate on why you think comments on papers might be dangerous? For me it seems like the most natural step forward, given where we are today.&lt;p&gt;As I see it, it would solve many issues. Ideally, we would move away from a publication-count metric, and more onto a reputation-based metric. It would lower the bar for participation in scientific discussion, make reproducibility more important, and generally be a healthy thing for science as a whole, I think. But I want to hear opposing viewpoints!</text></comment>
<story><title>A Reboot of the Legendary Physics Site ArXiv Could Shape Open Science</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/05/legendary-sites-reboot-shape-future-open-science/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>charles_dickens</author><text>Interesting to see their approach and the reasons why they are not building more features on top of ArXiv. Although comments on papers might be a dangerous area to venture into there are definitely places on the web where the ability to annotate and comment papers is helping science move forward. A good example is the Polymath project and Terry Tao&amp;#x27;s blog. Tao&amp;#x27;s recent solution to the Erdos discrepancy problem,an 80-year-old number theory problem, was actually triggered by a comment on his blog. Another example is www.fermatslibrary.com. Although the papers in the platform are more historical&amp;#x2F;foundational, they were able to get consistently good&amp;#x2F;constructive comments that help people understand papers better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>return0</author><text>&amp;gt; might be a dangerous area to venture into.&lt;p&gt;The only danger is that the true obnoxious nature of some academics would be aired in public. There is a lot to gain from opening up a discussion in each paper. Asking questions, making clarifications, even suggesting improvements are things that are not possible to do now.</text></comment>