[stncls]

The authors first list some issues with arXiv. Next, they describe how to fix those issues. Then the good news arrives: this improved arXiv already exists. It's called Authorea.com. All three authors are Authorea.com employees. They do disclose it as their affiliation. Still, this is essentially an ad written in LaTeX.

They correctly point out a few of the limitations of arXiv (mostly: static LaTeX and PDFs). But I profoundly dislike the other things they propose:

1. "open comments and reviews". I have no problem with open reviews on a third-party website, but arXiv is literally a "distribution service". It has one job and does it pretty well. I don't want it to turn into Reddit or (worse?) ResearchGate.

2. "alternative metrics". Enough with the metrics already. We all know they're destructive, at least all that have been tried so far. I didn't even know that arXiv showed some bibliometrics (because they are thankfully hidden behind default-disabled switches). Their proposed alternatives? "How many times a paper has been downloaded, tweeted, or blogged." I am not joking, this is what they propose to include in addition to citations. Seriously???

PS: Just a heads-up to anyone who, like me, would be wondering about the ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org link. The article is a regular paper submitted to arXiv. The authors do not belong to the organization maintaining arXiv. The usual link is: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020

The ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org thing is an experimental html5 paper viewer by the arXiv people.

Edit: typos.

[jimhefferon]

Thanks. It was not clear to me whether this is a white paper by the arXiv people, or talk by external folks.

I now see that Wikipedia says this.

Authorea was launched in February 2013 by co-founders Alberto Pepe and Nathan Jenkins and scientific adviser Matteo Cantiello, who met while working at CERN. They recognized common difficulties in the scholarly writing and publishing process. To address these problems, Pepe and Jenkins developed an online, web-based editor to support real-time collaborative writing, and sharing and execution of research data and code. Jenkins finished the first prototype site build in less than three weeks.

Bootstrapping for almost two years, Pepe and Jenkins grew Authorea by reaching out to friends and colleagues, speaking at events and conferences, and partnering with early adopter institutions.

In September 2014, Authorea announced the successful closure of a $610K round of seed funding with the New York Angels and ff Venture Capital groups. In January 2016, Authorea closed a $1.6M round of funding led by Lux Capital and including the Knight Foundation and Bloomberg Beta. It later acquired the VC-backed company The Winnower.

In 2018 Authorea was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Atypon (part of Wiley).

[sdenton4]

I don't really see how a for-profit preprint service is desirable, given the terrible track record of other for-profit entities in academic publishing. The extra features will be great until the gatekeeping kicks in after the first missed funding round...