SciRate: an open source website to browse, save and comment arXiv articles

E.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.4006.pdf section 1.1 should have floor function instead of brackets IMO.

Presently, when you do a scientific work, the article goes to a referee who then sends you back their comments which you account for before resubmitting. Sometimes you get an excellent referee who really knows his stuff and gives reasonable comments for improvements. Sometimes you get a guy who really just can't be bothered who gives minimal comments leading you to wonder if they've even read it. Sometimes you get an opposing group, which frequently leads to untenable comments and prompts submission to a different journal.

This is the only feedback you will ever get outside of your coauthors except the citation count. In my opinion it would be amazing to have some big named authors who have read your paper drop off advice, what they liked what they didn't like, etc. At most universities in most groups you do "journal club" once a week where you discuss others' papers and produce this exact feedback, but there's no forum to post it in, so it just stays in the journal club.

However, just as abuse on arXiv led to the transformation to an invitation only site (I forget if you need an invite or just a university sponsored email; see also vixra.com), the community on a site like this _should require your real identity_.

It could be devastating to a young researcher to have their work publicly shamed by an anonymous commenter who has it out for their research group. But if the comments are linked to real identities, I think the community will police itself... Although there are frequently unofficial "response to... " articles on the arXiv, they are publicly attached to other research groups, and you will sometimes see "response to response to ..." letters.

It's interesting to see these sort of 2010 things popping up amongst our 1990s bastion websites like arxiv and ADS and such (see researchgate, the facebook of scientists). But frequently they kind of seem to fall victim to the same downfalls of their non-scientific counterparts ("cite" is the equivalent of "like" on researchgate to improve your "profile impact" metric so you frequently get people acting needy about "citation requests" even though we have our own metrics like Hirsch Indeces to measure scientific productiveness in an objective way).

TLDR; I worry that a comment based website could host troll-like behavior which could be especially harmful when the whole premise is people's professional work. This is one of the few places on the internet where I think real names must be required and institutional affiliation should be provided (as is the case with arXiv). As it is I signed up with a BS name and email in 5 seconds and can immediately start trashing this paper on quantum physics that I know nothing about.