“arXiv is a cancer that promotes the dissemination of junk “science” in a format that is indistinguishable from real publications. And promotes the hectic “can’t keep up” + “anything older than 6 months is irrelevant” CS culture….
As a result [of the controversy over the tweet above], I thought I should take some time to lay out my thoughts on peer review and access to scholarly publishing, in a format that has more room for nuance….
Scholarship should be open: The results of scientific and other scholarly work should be accessible to the broad public, and not locked up behind paywalls. This is important for both the goal of scholarship (often publicly funded) benefiting society and the goal of research communities becoming more diverse.
Scholarship should be inclusive: A diverse research community does better research because it benefits from more perspectives AND no one should be prevented from participating in the research they want to do because of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, etc. (We are a long way from achieving this goal.)
A third value I think is less widely held, but it is important to me and I hope many others:
Scholarship should be slow: We engage in science and other scholarship to learn about our world and to serve our communities. In the best cases, we develop and substantiate new ideas firmly rooted in what has gone before and our new ideas respond to and uplift human values….”