Timeline for Community Peer-Review in Mathoverflow
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 13, 2019 at 20:41 | comment | added | Thanasis Stylianou | I plan to start an area 51 site: meta.mathoverflow.net/q/4320/40644 Any support is welcome! | |
| Jan 26, 2017 at 17:50 | vote | accept | Konstantinos Kanakoglou | ||
| Jan 6, 2017 at 16:10 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila Mod | [...] I am currently preparing a talk for the arctic set theory conference in a few weeks. I am very very reluctant to say a lot of things because it's a public lecture, and because there are slides. I chose a topic which is still work in progress, work which I haven't discussed with many people outside my closer circle of mathematicians, because I don't want to spread "mistakes" and not everything is verified. Making mistakes in public (both as a reviewer and a writer) does not make it easier to make the mistakes, and some people find those to be even more off-putting. | |
| Jan 6, 2017 at 16:08 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila Mod | I know several people who actively try to avoid MathOverflow. Some highly reputed mathematicians, whose reasoning is "I'll probably won't be able to stop, and I won't work on my own research as much as I'd want to"; and young people "I am too afraid to embarrass myself by saying stupid things". MO works largely because of social engineering, yes, but also because there is a large part of the mathematical community which "fits the profile". Here we intentionally ignore the other part, which is probably even larger. [...] | |
| Jan 6, 2017 at 15:53 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | My opinion is that MathOverflow works in large part due to the genius social engineering of the site, which for various reasons that the social scientists are studying motivates people to participate (e.g. even in the absense of financial compensation). It is a mistake to underestimate the power of this social engineering. I believe that it is the public nature of the participation that will help such a peer-review system to succeed on MathOverflow. The arxiv and the article-review system generally suffer from a lack of well-designed social engineering motivating participation. | |
| Jan 6, 2017 at 15:43 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila Mod | So all those people, many of which I met already in real life, who have looked at my paper in the arXiv announcements and said "Eh, I'll read it later", would suddenly be eager to help. Other than the novelty factor, which tends to dry out after a couple of weeks (or months at best), how is this sustainable? Especially since the expert of a given field remain the same expert over a long period of time. | |
| Jan 6, 2017 at 13:19 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | Yes, I do, and that is why I support this idea, as an integrated system. The difference is that we have here a community of expert mathematicians ready to engage in mathematics online. If the reviews are part of some other site, merely linked to here, then it will be dead. | |
| Jan 6, 2017 at 13:04 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila Mod | Oddly enough, however, despite being on arXiv for a while, for the whole world to see, I receive little to no comments on my papers (the one about Fodor's lemma received some comments from people who were asked specifically to read it, but not much else). Do you think that if I had posted them here, it would be any different? | |
| Jan 6, 2017 at 10:50 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | Oh, my view is that the peer-review system would be most successful and interesting, if it should be integrated with the MO site, and not merely linked or conceived as a separate site. Indeed, I think this kind of integration is what could make it successful. It would add to MO. The expertise is here, the interest, the number of knowledgeable people. Imagine having great papers come up in the MO feed---it would be great! Commenting on papers is similar enough to answering questions, a kind of long-form question, that I think it would work well as an integrated system. This is why I support it. | |
| Jan 6, 2017 at 9:32 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila Mod | Joel, this sounds like "This sounds like a very good another site to have linked from the main page, perhaps even an RSS-feed thereof". I'm not disagreeing with your claims about refereeing being broken (although I admittedly had very limited tenure on both side of the process), but it seems like a bad fit to this website. I do think, though, that if such an experiment is constructed properly, having an RSS feed or some link highly visible on the main page is not necessarily a bad thing. | |
| Jan 5, 2017 at 21:23 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | There have been previous attempts at such discussion. Perhaps someone will recall Andrew Stacey's website which was like old meta for publishing (I forgot). Also some overlay journals and things like the Selected Papers Network exist. Also, the nLab is a successful variation but using notes instead of papers. I encourage an independent effort by motivated members of this community. I discourage making any tight links between such an effort and MathOverflow as we don't understand how frail or robust is the forum ecology. Gerhard "Do Not Globally Warm MathOverflow" Paseman, 2017.01.05. | |
| Jan 5, 2017 at 20:40 | comment | added | Konstantinos Kanakoglou | thank you for your feedback. This is what I had in mind initially: trying an experimental form of community peer-reviewing (possibly in some seperate stream) and watching it over time to see whether it will prove successfull and to what extend. I have some more concrete thoughts about it but I am sure lots of other people will also have. I will wait for some more feedback and maybe I will come back with some edit or some new relevant post. Maybe it would be also interesting and relevant to discuss what mathematical peer-reviewing is today and what it should be .... | |
| Jan 5, 2017 at 16:52 | history | answered | Joel David Hamkins | CC BY-SA 3.0 |