Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason why publications can't be publicly available before they are reviewed? The journals could still play the same role, highlighting the most significant publications. I'm not an academic so I'm not familiar with the feedback process between a journal and a paper's author. Is there any reason that any refinements couldn't take place in public. A version of github focused on academic papers would seem like a good model.

View on HN

When a paper fits into one of the categories arXiv accepts, that's more or less what happens (modulo the cranks who claim to prove Riemann's hypothesis every now and then, but that's a whole different topic :)

The difficulty is that some publishers don't allow you to make pdfs of the final versions of papers freely available. Of course, you can always publish draft versions, which is not entirely a bad thing.

There's nothing preventing professors from posting papers to their website or the arXiv.

I imagine you could incorporate revisions if you liked. (And my "I imagine", I mean "I did this when I published papers in the past".) This is probably against the letter of the copyright agreement, but I don't give a damn, and AFAIK publishers don't dare go after people who do this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com