[tischler]

It is basically the prisoner's dilemma. The free publication platforms do not yet have prestige because few prestigious researchers publish there; but only few prestigious researchers publish on free publication platforms because they are not prestigious enough.

The only way to overcome a prisoner's dilemma is education and trust.

[make3]

I'm computer science, everyone is publishing on arxiv.org . why can't other fields?

[lewis500]

The difference is in the MO for publishing in a given field...not the conscious venue selection so much. From what I know, computer scientists have a high publication rate, rank conference publications as pretty important and sometimes write papers that are about something they built.

Compare this to economists. For economists, it's all about hitting a home run a couple times...publishing a few career-making papers in the best possible journals. Economists will publish only a couple times per year, and their papers are sometimes very long. The review process is crazy: the time between first draft of the paper and final publication can be like five years.

I think what determines this is the difficulty of ascertaining the quality of a piece of work. In CS or math or math physics, I think anyone in a certain subfield is capable of ascertaining how good a paper is. It doesn't need to be extremely long or flashy, and chances are it will make an incremental improvement. By contrast, let's say an economist publishes a paper called "do red light cameras encourage speeding?" The intended audience (economists) doesn't really know anything about red light cameras or driver behavior. They don't have the time to do all the data analyses themselves, and until recently would never even have access to the data. So they look for a bunch of other markers of quality: writing style, citations, length, venue, etc.

[greeneggs]

It takes a lot of education. Computer science was actually very slow in moving to the arXiv. The "open" way that people in the field used to use was to link to pdfs on their homepages. An utter disaster for discoverability and archivability. Researchers move around all the time. But this was the standard! It took years for a critical mass to develop such that publishing to the arXiv became the expected standard.

[posterboy]

> I'm

Is this so? Every other paper I search has no pdf linked on google scholar, e.g. papers from the bibliographies of arxiv preprints.

[flor1s]

arxiv is great, but for getting your PhD and a future career in academia, publishing there doesn't count nearly as much as publishing in peer reviewed journals does.

[make3]

I mean, in combination with conferences, not just there, obv