Correspondence with Cornell re the
unsatisfactory management of the
physics preprint archive
Disingenuous answers, not reasoned
response, the norm in response to
concerns of arxiv's contributors
A sad
day for science, a sad saga for Cornell!
Introduction
The physics preprint archive (arxiv.org) is a publicly funded facility
with two functions. It is both an archive, and a mechanism for
facilitating
communication within the physics community. Registered users log
on and upload preprints, which are moved to the publicly viewable area
of the archive on a daily basis after moderation. For the
convenience of users, the archive is divided up into a number of
sections and subsections. Some regulation of content is clearly
necessary, and so there is a moderation process. Such a process
can be done well or
not so well. The cases documented on our web site archivefreedom.org
suggest that the moderators frequently step in on the basis of finding
particlar topics unacceptable, rather than for any defensible
reason. Those who run the system are significantly less tolerant
than what is the case with the scientific community as a whole; some
papers that have been published in refereed journals have been barred
from the archive, while endorsements by experts outside the system have
been overruled by moderators. Publication in a referreed journal
indicates that papers have been vetted by experts while papers in the
archive have subjected only to rudimentary checking, and this
differential is the reverse of what one might expect.
Worse, the archive has no effective complaints mechanism. In
principle, one can send a complaint to a moderator address, but any
such complaints are met by bland (or on occasion facetious) replies,
sent anonymously under cover of an arxiv alias. A typical,
frequently employed, disingenuous response is
'you have available to you many other channels by which you
can communicate your ideas' (disingenuous because none of these other
channels is in any way comparable to the archive).
One can attempt to bypass the system by writing to Cornell library
staff, since the archive is officially a service provided by the
library. The first time I tried this, some years ago, I had the
misfortune to encounter an apparatchik
and got nowhere. More recently, irritated by having had a paper
categorised as 'unsuitable for crosslisting'. I tried again and
was pleased to encounter what appeared to be a human being. Now
read on ...
A promising start, after I had
written to a colleague to request endorsement for the quant-ph section
of the archive:
from www-admin@arxiv.org, Aug. 24th at 11:08
(all times GMT)
You've just been endorsed to submit papers to
the arXiv archive quant-ph
(Quantum Physics). Visit
http://arxiv.org/submit/
to submit papers. Endorsement is a necessary but not a sufficient
condition to have papers accepted in arXiv; arXiv reserves the right to
reject or reclassify any submission.
But then ...
from www-admin@arxiv.org, Aug. 24th at 20:15
Your submission has been moved to the physics.gen-ph (General
Physics)
subject class on the advice of our moderators, who have determined it
better suited to that subject class.
Any questions regarding moderation must be directed to
moderation@arxiv.org. (The www-admin@arxiv.org address is for
technical queries only.)
Here is the correspondence that
followed when I complained about this:
To: moderation@arxiv.org, Aug. 25th. at 11:18, the
channel for complaints (not
answered):
Dear Moderator,
Would someone please explain to me the grounds on
which this paper (1108.4860)
has been barred from cross-posting? Anyone who in such a short
time was able to comprehend the difficult ideas in that paper deserves
my admiration, but I have reason to suppose that the real reason is
that, Sarah Thomas and Jean Poland's denials notwithstanding, I am on a
blacklist and whatever I had uploaded would have met with the same fate.
One would have hoped that the archive's moderators
would have learnt from the letter detailing the flaws of the archive
that Nature highlighted some time back, deliberately waiting till it
could be displayed as the leading letter of the week, but evidently not:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7028/pdf/433800a.pdf
"ArXiv has become a vital communicative resource for the physics
community. The moderators' attitude to any challenge to conventional
thinking is likely to result in the loss to science of important
innovative ideas. Radical changes are required in the way the archive
is administered."
For your information, the following may clarify the essence of the
paper. A physicist might compare the mass of the Earth and the mass of
humanity and, having examined possible catalytic processes, conclude
that the latter could not possibly significantly affect the former. And
yet we know this is not the case. Why? The explanation lies
in the 'interpretation cascade' discussed in the section 'From
simplicity to complexity and back' of my paper which you are
censoring. This is a radically new idea as far as physics is
concerned and you should not allow superficial reactions to cloud your
thinking. Please think again. quant-ph may not be the best
section for this (it happened to have an endorser who was not away at
the time) but confining it to the 'dump section' gen-ph is
inappropriate if anything is.
Yours sincerely, Brian Josephson
-----
to the person who dreamed up the system, Sept. 15th. at 23:25:
Dear Professor Ginsparg,
I am writing to ask if you accept that in defining
my recent submission, viz. arxiv:1108.4860, as 'inappropriate for
cross-posting', your moderators were in error (yes, I have followed
official procedure by writing to moderation@arxiv.org, making similar
points to those below. Any competent moderator would, I suggest,
have examined the paper, accepted the points made, and immediately have
restored cross-posting privileges. Despite the lapse of a number
of weeks, there has been no response, which I (and others) consider
unacceptable).
First I comment that this paper has been reviewed by
a number of people, both in connection with the conference and in
regard to its prospective inclusion in the conference
proceedings. One of these reviewers was hep-th endorser David
Finkelstein. Nothing that has come up in connection with these
reviews, and the ensuing discussions, has suggested any deficiency in
the paper itself.
The idea of cross-posting, as I understand it, is
that a paper by someone outside some specified research community may
touch on matters of relevance to that community. Cross-posting
provides a way to bring the attention of people in that community to
the existence of that paper, as may have fruitful consequences.
Readers can get some hint of what the paper is about through the
abstract, and can then decide whether to ignore the paper or download
the full paper to investigate further.
My abstract is perhaps not ideal for informing
physicists in general what exactly the paper was about -- it was
written for the benefit of the conference attendees, who were more
familiar with the ideas involved. The abstract does nevertheless
contain the sentence "In such a world-view, Wheeler?s
observer-participation and emergent law arise naturally, rather than
having to be imposed artificially." Many quantum theorists would
understand 'emergent law', this being a characteristic feature of
string theory, and quite a number will have heard of Wheeler's argument
to the effect that the choice of what is observed affects the
physics. People who have read his 'law without law' article
referred to in the title of the paper will in addition know that
Wheeler hoped to be able to derive all of physics somehow from the fact
of observation and the distinction between subject and object, but that
he had little idea how to accomplish this. A number of people
would, I believe, be intrigued by the assertion of the abstract that
there is a natural way to deal with these issues, and would want to
look further. The main point of the present, and ongoing work, is
that taking into account ideas from semiotics (the theory of signs)
provides a completely new perspective.
I can understand that a quick glance by a moderator
might well not suffice to appreciate all these things, but my
subsequent email to the moderators should have brought a swift
response. I trust there is nothing personal, or dogma-ridden,
behind the fact that my last two submissions were moved from quant-ph
to phys-gen, and barred from crossposting. You are, I gather,
funded by Cornell University, with which as it happens I have a
connection, having been a visiting Fellow there 30 years ago. I
do not think Cornell would be pleased at the arxiv's administration
acting on the basis of anything other than strictly scientific grounds.
I look forward to a response from you at your
earliest convenience.
-----
to Cornell Library, Oct. 5th. 2011 at 12:06:
Having failed to get a meaningful response from
either the moderators of the physics preprint archive or Prof. Ginsparg
himself, I am writing to you instead since the archive is officially in
the charge of Cornell University Library, whose name appears at the top
of the archive's pages. This concerns an issue that a number of
people have had with the archive, viz. that attempts to post a preprint
to a particular section of the archive are blocked by the arxiv team,
no justification being given for this other than a bare declaration of
'inappropriateness'. The significance of this barring lies in the
fact that people who have subscribed to a particular section get
emailed the abstracts of all postings, so that they can follow up in
detail any that they find of interest. If cross-posting to that
section is blocked, people in the area will not get to know about the
paper, contradicting one of the main declared purposes of the archive.
The preprint of particular concern here is
arXiv:1108.4860, based on a paper I gave at a conference and which was
accepted for the Proceedings after refereeing. This summarises a
new approach I have been developing to the question of the role of the
observer in physics, and the factors determining which laws of nature
will be observed, both of which are important issues.
I uploaded the paper initially to the quantum
physics section, for which section I had received endorsement from a
well-known expert in this area. Not only was the paper moved to the
section General Physics (which I have no problem with), but also it was
blocked from cross-posting to any
other area (as per the screengrab
at http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/images/restriction.jpg).
I could see no reason for this, given that the paper has been reviewed
by a number of people, and while there was considerable discussion,
leading to some improvements being made, no errors or misconceptions
were pointed out by the referees.
Finding it regrettable that researchers in quantum
physics would not get to know about these ideas through the standard
emailed list mechanism, on Aug. 25th. I wrote to the moderation thus:
> Dear Moderator,
>
>
> Would someone please explain to me the grounds
on which this paper
> (1108.4860) has been barred from cross-posting?
> etc.
Having received no reply, on Sept. 15th. I wrote to Prof. Ginsparg thus:
> I am writing to ask if you accept that in defining my recent
> submission, viz. arxiv:1108.4860, as 'inappropriate for
> cross-posting', your moderators were in error.
> ...
Again, after a number of weeks have gone by, no reply, not even a
simple acknowledgement of receipt.
The archive is not a journal, where publication
implies that some kind of standard has been reached. The fact
that the endorser was willing to endorse this paper should have been
enough, and the positive reception at the conference and by the
referees confirms this assessment. I accept that many theorists
these days have very narrow interests and would have no interest in
this particular paper, but I cannot believe that all people posting in
this area are so intellectually challenged. The fact that many
people in this subject area would have no interest in the paper cannot
be considered a credible reason for refusing to have this single
preprint added to the 20 or so submissions received per day in this
area so that those who do have an interest would be emailed the
abstract.
I do not find this behaviour, blocking the paper
from cross-posting in the first place, and the subsequent ignoring of
emails about this, acceptable. A predecessor of yours talked having no
problem with the archive 'maintaining Cornell's academic
standards'. It seems to me that the problem in this case is that
the running of the archive is not coming up to any reasonable standard
of what one might expect in an academic context. And this is by no
means an isolated occurrence, the whistleblowing web site
archivefreedom.org detailing many more.
Therefore I should like to request that you contact
Prof. Ginsparg, asking him either to provide credible justification for
this paper not being cross-posted to sections such as quant-ph, or to
remove the bar on crossposting. I would also hope that he and his
colleagues stop this silly behaviour in future, and allow experienced
scientists to decide for themselves what areas are appropriate for
cross-posting, perhaps subject to some limit in number.
---------
from Cornell Library, Oct. 6, 2011, 15:39
Dear Professor Josephson,
Your message below has been forwarded to me. After investigation, I
believe that all arXiv moderation practices and policies were correctly
followed with regard to your submission.
After you submitted your paper to arXiv, arXiv moderators responsible
for quant-ph and gr-qc did not accept your paper for their categories,
and it was therefore announced in gen-ph.
What was not explained to you, and I apologize for this, is that arXiv
rarely allows cross-lists from "General Physics", as this subject
category has relevance to all other areas of physics, and is therefore
already viewable by interested readers.
The arXiv moderation process applies a uniform set of procedures to
every arXiv submission. While authors suggest appropriate paper
classifications, final decisions about classification, including cross
listings, are in the hands of subject moderators. arXiv administrators
at Cornell merely implement these decisions.
While I understand your frustration that you cannot completely control
the classification of your paper, please be assured that your
submission to arXiv has been treated in a manner consistent with all
other arXiv submissions.
Best regards,
-------
To Cornell, Oct. 6th. 2011 at 19:06
Thank you for your reply. You are now the
third representative of the archive who has failed to respond to my
request for an explanation for why my paper was not accepted for these
categories. The natural conclusion many would draw from this
failure is that the moderators based their decision merely on 'a
cursory glance' at the paper (a phrase taken from Prof. Ginsparg's
recent article in Nature), that they did read it but lacked the ability
to follow the arguments and thereby come to a meaningful conclusion, or
alternatively that it was a matter of whim, or personal hostility, on
the part of the moderator concerned. No responsible journal editor
would reject a paper in this way without giving a reason and it is
interesting that the arxiv people have not come up with one.
The 'arXiv moderation practices and policies' to
which you refer do, unfortunately, allow a person, under cover of
anonymity, to conduct a vendetta against individuals, and there is
evidence, including what appears to be a blackmail letter from an arxiv
official that has been reposted on the web, to suggest that this
sometimes happens. I am not satisfied that there was a good scientific reason for barring
cross-posting in the present
case. I have a fair amount of experience lecturing to
physicists on matters relating to this preprint, and the discussions
following these lectures lead me to presume that there is considerable
interest in the ideas. I therefore request that the bar be lifted.
> What was not explained to you, and I apologize for this, is that
> arXiv rarely allows cross-lists from "General Physics", as this
> subject category has relevance to all other areas of physics, and
is
> therefore already viewable by interested readers.
I am afraid I don't follow your logic. Viewability is not the issue but actual views (of the abstract at
least), as my original letter should have made clear. What
proportion of quant-ph subscribers routinely look at the abstracts in
gen-ph? If you can convince me that a substantial proportion of
quant-ph subscribers also scan the gen-ph abstracts to see if there is
anything of interest to them then I will withdraw my request, but my
guess is that the majority are too busy to do this, and look only at
the sections that they subscribe to.
I look forward to a satisfactory conclusion to my
request.
-----
From Cornell Library, Oct. 6th., 22:35
Your paper was not accepted to quant-ph and gr-qc because the
moderators responsible for those categories rejected it. They did not
feel it was suitable for, or of sufficient interest to, those areas.
As you have noted, the arXiv is not a journal, and we do not provide
editorial comments on the content of papers. If you wish such feedback,
we urge you to submit your paper to an appropriate journal.
-----
To Cornell, Oct. 7th. 10:02
Thank you again for your quick response. I do
indeed plan to write up this work for a journal in some form in due
course, but it will be some time before that happens, and one of the
aims of the archive as I understand it is to speed up the
communication process, so that people can become aware of current
developments in their field prior to their appearance in a
journal. It so happens also that I cannot submit this particular
paper to a journal since it will be appearing eventually in the
conference proceedings, and dual publication would not be
permitted. Let me comment also that it is not 'areas' that read
preprints but people, and my experience in lecturing on this subject
contradicts the view of the moderator. I might add further that
once upon a time someone did a test that showed clearly that he was
being targeted by the archive; if he changed his email address so that
the system did not recognise him then the archive stopped blocking his
submissions. This contradicts the view that it is the content of a preprint, rather than
some extraneous considerations such as who
is submitting, that determines whether or not the moderators undertake
blocking action.
But let me leave such issues aside and simply ask,
just to clarify the situation, whether I would be correct in presuming
that the moderators would not shift their position even were a number
of prominent scientists to write in in support of my request?
I should be grateful, also, if you could explain to
me exactly what the problem is with cross-posting to an area where not
many people might be interested in the paper concerned. With a
paper journal space is limited, and so readership interest is clearly a
relevant consideration. With an electronic repository on the
other hand, disc space costs very little and so it is of less
relevance. And in the case of cross-posting, no disc space is
involved at all; no matter how many sections a preprint is listed in,
only one copy needs to be kept on disc. I do not, quite honestly,
see why it cannot be left to the judgement of authors as to which areas
a preprint that is not obviously wrong should be crossposted to, while
allowing the moderators to determine the primary area (which will
ensure that unthinking posting to an genuinely inappropriate area can
be overridden, since positive action has to be taken to cross-post a
submission later on). I accept the principle that crossposting
should be numerically limited.
The only relevant consideration might be the
possibility of overloading a section with irrelevant material.
Let us then look at the statistics, to see if this is a real problem or
just one in the minds of the administrators. Last week, there
were 21 preprints in the gen-ph section. On checking this
out, I was interested to see that, contrary to your earlier statement
'arXiv rarely allows cross-lists from "General Physics"', as many as 5
of the 21 were cross-listed, leaving 16 that were not. In the
worst possible case, where each of these were cross-posted to quant-ph
by their authors, this would mean 16 extra postings to quant-ph in the
last week in addition to the 106 actually posted. A more
realistic figure for crosspostings, taking into account the subject
matter of the preprints concerned, would come to at most 2 additional
postings per day. Most would not see this as significant
overloading, given that normally it takes only a couple of seconds for
someone to look at a preprint's title and decide not to look
further. I do not think therefore that overloading is a serious
objection.
Cornell is a very highly regarded institution (I
myself regarded it so highly that in 1971 I spent 5 months there as
Visiting Fellow in the Solid State section (LASSP)). It should
not be giving its blessing to a system that many would consider
seriously flawed and counterproductive. It may interest you to
know that one well endowed Cornell alumnus has written the university
out of his will on account of his irrational treatment by the archive.
-----
To Cornell Library, Oct. 9th., 14:10
To take up these issues further, I gather Cornell
provides much of the funding for the arxiv, and therefore does have an
interest in how well it is being run. The basic objection to the
current arrangements is captured by the subtitle that Nature's
editorial staff provided for a letter by myself (see attached) that
they published in 2005:
"Putting control in the hands of a few can enforce orthodoxy and stifle
innovative ideas"
In detail, I observed that:
> ArXiv has become a vital communicative resource for the physics
> community. The moderators' attitude to any challenge to
> conventional thinking is likely to result in the loss to science of
> important innovative ideas.
Apart from the introduction of the endorsement system, little has
changed since that date. The archive is still run in a way that
leads to the stifling of innovative ideas: this is pretty inevitable,
as I discuss below, given the way moderation is carried out, as
enhanced by their inadequate responses to appeals. Here, from my
Nature letter, are some prize examples of the latter, from occasions
when moderation did deign to respond:
> For example, having stated that a very distinguished physicist’s
[Cornell's Hans Bethe if I recall correctly]
> strong support of a submission carried no weight because this
> physicist "was not intimately familiar with the work in
> question", the moderators simply ignored subsequent support from an
> endorser with publications on the same subject.
(and they still ignore endorsement -- my paper had just been endorsed
for quant-ph by a prominent worker in the field).
and again:
> ... in another example, the moderators' response to the information
> that more than one eminent physicist had an interest in a subject
> that they wished to bar was: "We are always thrilled to hear when
> people find an avocation that keeps them off the streets and out of
> trouble."
a style of dealing with complaints that might very well be
characterised as a perversion of normal practice. 'Putting
control in the hands of a few', indeed (and a rather unpleasant few, to
judge by the above examples).
Ginsparg has described the problematic moderation
process thus: "Incoming abstracts are given a cursory glance by
volunteer external moderators for appropriateness to their subject
areas". You will note that the volunteers look at the abstract,
not the paper itself, and whether an abstract is recognised as being
relevant or not is a function of the knowledge of the moderator*.
Both title and abstract of my paper referred to 'Wheeler's
observer-participation', which should have caused a competent moderator
to recognise the paper as being relevant to quantum physics.
Again, the 'law without law' idea mentioned in the title, of which my
paper is a critique, comes from a chapter devoted to this concept in a
specialist book entitled 'Quantum Theory and Measurement', published by
Princeton University Press (my ref. 2). The moderator concerned
seems to have had insufficient knowledge of these matters, to the
detriment of his assessment.
Of course, any system is liable to error. The
problem here is that the moderators will not admit to error. I
asked them "Would someone please explain to me the grounds on which
this paper (1108.4860) has been barred from cross-posting?" and there
was no response. They did not answer because there is no credible
answer they could give, only that, contrary to the opinion of my
endorser, they judged it 'inappropriate'.
This 'cursory glance' approach does discriminate
against innovative research for the following reason: innovative work
is likely to follow different lines to typical papers and hence look
inappropriate if one does not follow the detail. It is also
likely to get flagged as problematic by Prof. Ginsparg's ingenious
automated filters, which perhaps do examine the whole of the text of a
paper.
Why in any case does the archive go to all this
trouble to block papers from particular areas? It is wrong to
suggest, as Ginsparg does in his Nature article: "arXiv unintentionally
becomes an accrediting agency for researchers, much as the Science
Citation Index became an accrediting agency for journals, by
formulating criteria for their inclusion." It is well known that arxiv
is self-archiving and that any filtering is very rudimentary; no
journal would consider being in the archive as a substitute for proper
refereeing, and no minimally knowledgeable employer would consider
appearance in the arxiv as a substitute for proper publication.
Some journals do ask authors to post their preprints on the archive
before sending them out for review, but this is just to simplify the
review process, and barring by the archive actually prevents the
authors concerned sending in papers to journals that impose this
requirement (incidentally, the arxiv has sometimes blocked published
papers, again setting itself up as the arbiter of value rather than
more generally recognised forms of assessment). Ginsparg's
lumping together arxiv with the citation index, as in the above quote
from his article, is disingenuous: if a paper is cited by a number of
other people, that is a genuine indication of its merit, in a way that
inclusion in the archive is not.
I find it extremely objectionable, and offensive,
that some inexperienced moderator can, on the basis of a superficial
examination of a paper, prevent the communication of my ideas to the
quantum physics community, some of whom I am sure would be interested
in my approach; and that they refuse to enter into dialogue about
it. The archive is supposed to be a service to research
workers, and instead appears to be a disservice
to people who have
novel approaches to problems in science.
I see, if I log on from our university network, that
the archive is partly sponsored by Cambridge University (though it does
not yet feature in the online sponsors list), and I am sure those who
agreed to this would not be pleased at their funding being abused in
this way. May I ask that these comments be passed on to those who
oversee the system for their consideration.
Yours sincerely,
Brian Josephson
PS: regarding your
> If you wish such feedback, we urge you to submit your paper to an
> appropriate journal.
while it was kind of you to make this suggestion, I have already had
feedback regarding the paper from a number of reviewers, and the wish
to get feedback was not the point of my communication.
* possibly the moderator concerned did look at the paper as well, but
it uses generally unfamiliar arguments and I would not expect the
average reviewer to understand what the arguments without putting in a
fair amount of effort.
-----
From Cornell, Oct. 11th, 02:40
Thank you for sharing your critique of arXiv with us. I will see that
it is passed on to the various people and groups that contribute to
arXiv's operation.
Researchers at Cambridge University are among the heaviest users of
arXiv worldwide, in terms of both submissions and downloads. We
appreciate their use of arXiv and their support. Please do discuss your
concerns with your local colleagues and librarians.
------
To Cornell, Oct. 11th, 08:15
> Thank you for sharing your critique of arXiv with us. I will see
that
> it is passed on to the various people and groups that contribute to
> arXiv's operation.
Thank you very much for doing this. Since
writing to you, one of my contacts has told me of a rather dramatic
case where someone with 200 publications to his name published a paper
in Physics Letters that 'showed that the work of some big shots [was]
wrong'. Soon after this, the author found himself barred from
posting to the archive, believed to be the consequence of pressure from
the
'big shots'. I have not investigated the details, but can well
believe the story because once, after I had disputed certain archive
policies, I found myself being confronted, when I tried to upload a
preprint, with a message that I was 'not permitted to post to the
archive' (they thought better of this after I had written suggesting
that they 'fix their system error').
----
To Cornell, Oct. 29th., 21:23
> Thank you for sharing your critique of arXiv with us. I will see
that
> it is passed on to the various people and groups that contribute to
> arXiv's operation.
I wonder if there has been any response from these
people? I suspect not; past experience suggests that they respond
only to their own interests, ignoring those of the wider community,
often not deigning to respond to an enquiry if producing a credible
response to it is seen to be problematic.
I take it that the issue of 'enforcing orthodoxy',
thereby blocking the transmission of innovative ideas, is one on which
Cornell has views, and may I suggest therefore that the people
responsible be asked when they propose to respond to the email that you
passed on to them. If/when they do respond, the adequacy of that
response can become a matter to be discussed between us.
----
[On Oct. 30th. as background, details were sent of the case of Paul
Violette, summarised thus:
I would like to bring you up to date on recent developments of my
attempt to stop arXiv.org from blocking me in uploading my paper to the
gr-qc section. I recently discovered that just after I was
successfully endorsed to upload to gr-qc, they continued to block me
from uploading and then revoked the endorsement priveleges of my
endorser who was eminently qualified. He had uploaded 10 papers
to the gr-qc section in the past 5 years.]
----
From Cornell, Nov. 11th., 04:57
I have discussed your critique of arXiv with those involved in its
administration. You have raised provocative and interesting questions.
I am afraid that I cannot provide an extended response, but I will make
these few comments.
arXiv now receives over 6,000 submissions per month (nearly 7,000 in
Oct.). It operates with very lean staffing and depends on the volunteer
efforts of moderators worldwide. We do not ask moderators to
peer-review articles. We ask them to assess whether articles are
plausibly interesting to their communities. This is certainly a
subjective judgment, and the boundaries of any scientific community are
not clearly defined. Nevertheless, we believe that the arXiv moderation
process is extremely accurate in its assessments, and that it is the
most cost-effective and efficient way of dealing with the volume of
submissions coming into arXiv. I can also emphasize that we are
confident in the knowledge and experience of arXiv moderators.
Finally, we do not believe that arXiv is blocking the transmission of
any scholarship or stifling innovative ideas, primarily because arXiv
is not by any measure the sole means for communicating scientific
ideas. You have available to you many other channels by which you can
communicate your ideas to the quantum physics community.
-----
The following
emails were sent to
Cornell Library in response:
response 1, Nov. 13th., 18:30
On 11 November 2011 04:57:55 +0000 you wrote among
other things:
> we believe that the arXiv moderation process is extremely accurate
in
> its assessments
Before I respond to the rest of your email, may I ask what is the basis
of this particular assertion, which I find puzzling? A fair
proportion of papers that have been blocked (either completely or from
a particular area) have been published in refereed journals. Are
you saying that even in these cases, where there is an apparent
difference in opinion between moderators and referees, the moderators
got it right and the peer-reviewers got it wrong? That would be
surprising, given that referees typically give papers more detailed
attention than one gathers your moderators do. Can you clarify,
please?
It is unclear to me in any case how one would measure the accuracy of
the moderation process, since a statement of accuracy requires some way
of deciding what the correct result of a given assessment would
be. If however all you mean is that there is a high level of
consistency between the views of different moderators, then I am afraid
I have to disillusion you, since in the past views consistently held by
'experts' have often been wrong. Here is a famous example
[source: Wikipedia]:
> Semmelweis postulated the theory of washing with chlorinated lime
> solutions in 1847[1] while working in Vienna General Hospital's
First
> Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the
> mortality of midwives' wards. ... Despite various publications of
> results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 1%,
> Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established
scientific
> and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the
> medical community.
The existence of factors tending to make all members of a social
community think in similar ways is, I am afraid, liable to give anyone
who equates consistency with truth a false impression. I,
personally, would derive from the facts cited a different conclusion,
viz.: "these observations suggest that moderators asked to judge the
merits of a paper quickly have their judgments swayed by superficial
cues, leading to their views being less reliable than those of referees
who give a paper more detailed attention". I am open to being
persuaded that your own view is the correct one, however.
------
response 2: Nov. 15th., 19:34
There is a further point that needs to be added to
my previous comment which was to the effect that:
> ... moderators asked to judge the merits of a paper quickly [may]
> have their judgments swayed by superficial cues.
Namely, however expert your moderators may be in their own field, quite
often it is the author who is
the person most expert in the subject
matter of a given paper, particularly if this contains novel ideas that
would take a referee or a moderator quite some time to come to terms
with, or if it incorporates ideas unfamiliar to most workers in the
area concerned (as is arguably the case for those papers of my own that
were moved to gen-ph by a moderator). The handicap that the
moderators may be under in such circumstances provides a strong
argument in favour of the author's views having priority.
I want to concentrate however on the following
critical extract from your own letter:
> ... we do not believe that arXiv is blocking the transmission of
> any scholarship or stifling innovative ideas, primarily because
arXiv
> is not by any measure the sole means for communicating scientific
> ideas. You have available to you many other channels by which you
can
> communicate your ideas to the quantum physics community.
This is, on the face of it, a disingenuous
argument. Alternative communication channels exist certainly, but
the issue is how effective
they are compared with arxiv in regard to
communication with potential readers (a matter glossed over in the
above). The outlets I am aware of are uniformly inferior to arxiv
in one or more of the following respects: number of persons browsing
the content, delays due to the refereeing process etc., and the
proportion of high-quality papers that are accepted (for example,
journals such as Phys. Rev. Letters have room for only a fraction of
the papers of this kind that they receive, and so would not generally
come up for consideration).
Arxiv is a significant factor in promoting
scientific advance, as evidenced by the number of emails one gets
telling one about new results that people have become aware of through
the archive. If arxiv's administrators really believe that its
moderators' actions do not have an adverse effect on the transmission
of innovative ideas they need to make a reasoned case for this, not
merely give bland, politician-like reassurances. In this
connection, it is worth noting the words of a correspondent:
> As a US citizen, I see the arXiv as being paid by the US Government
> (taxpayers) to provide a service.
Barring a paper from crosslisting is a disservice, not a service.
The statement copied above (regarding the blocking
of the transmission of scholarship) seems to me, and to others who have
seen it, to be in essence a political statement and one that would
crumble under close examination. If then an author, who may very
well understand the implications of his or her work far better than can
some moderator who has had only brief acquaintance with the ideas in
the paper, believes that his or her work is more likely to be
discovered by researchers who will find the work of interest should it
be listed in area X, then he or she should be allowed to have it listed
in area X, always assuming the paper has no serious defects (real
defects, I must emphasise, not ones that are purely reflections of
moderator prejudice).
Again, your assertion
> [arxiv] operates with very lean staffing and depends on the
volunteer
> efforts of moderators worldwide
is, I am sorry to say, a red herring, as nothing needs to be done to
implement the desirable changes other than a change in the instructions
to moderators, as I will show. My proposal is that the system
whereby a moderator can move an upload from the area designated by the
author to one that the moderator considers more appropriate should
remain, since an author may in fact not have made a good choice of
primary area. However, if an author then considers the
moderator's judgment to have been at fault, that author should be able
to crosslist to the original area (and also, subject to suitable limits
as to number, to other designated areas), simply by using the existing
crosslisting mechanism. In other words, the ability of a
moderator to bar crosslisting should be removed, a change that would
involve no extra work for those who run the archive. Particular
people may object to particular choices made possible as a result, but
that should be considered their own problem, to be dealt with by their
developing tolerance, or alternatively attending anger management
classes.
In conclusion, I think that most people seeing this
correspondence will conclude that the people running the arxiv have
been very busy inventing excuses to avoid changing a policy that is,
ultimately, unjustifiable. Cornell does not come out well out of
this.
------
response 3, Nov. 30th, 2011
17:39
I see there is no response to my 'response 2' of
Nov. 15th. with its analysis of the 'disingenuous arguments' provided
by the arxiv administrators in response to criticisms. I can well
imagine that a person of your integrity would not wish to endorse
further the dubious defences of its procedures that the administrators
have drummed up. This business is clearly related to personal
characteristics of those involved, disrespect being a prominent feature
of the way arxiv deals with those who write to it, as well as its
practice of ducking key issues.
As with other situations, power corrupts.
Arxiv could have been run in a proper, civil manner, but it proved
tempting for some people to take advantage of the absolute power that
controllers of the archive have, and to abuse that power in the service
of personal dislikes. Thus we see the blocking of papers which
had already demonstrated their admissibility to the archive by having
passed the refereeing test, and the overruling of experienced endorsers
(in which connection, I have previously pointed out the irrelevance of
the degree of experience of the moderators, such experience being of
little value when they have to come to quick conclusions in regard to
new approaches).
Once proper behaviour has stopped being the norm,
behaving improperly starts to become the usual thing to do. A sad
day for science, a sad saga for Cornell!
------
The current situation (December 20th. 2011) is as follows:
- Cornell has expressed the view that the current arrangements are the best possible under the circumstances
- I have suggested (December 14th.) two things that could be done unproblematically:
- the change in procedure suggested in response 2 above, allowing authors some say regarding crosslisting
- making the directions given to moderators public
A response to these suggestions is awaited.
Posted by Brian Josephson on
December 20th., 2011
Comments to bdj10-at-cam-dot-ac-dot-uk
