Arxiv.org reaches a milestone and a reckoning
What you lose on arxiv is peer review. That might sound like a feature- you get
to let others know of your results faster- but if you make a mistake it will not
be caught until it's out in the wild (and possibly until everyone has already
cited it and based their own work on it). With peer-review you know that someone
will read your work that has the background to understand it and to catch
errors.So what, you'll say, independent experts can catch your mistake if they read the
paper on arxiv and contact you to suggest a correction. Yes, but there's no
incentive to do the hard work to correct mistakes if your paper is already on
arxiv and people are already citing it (who didn't do their due dilligence).
Then errors start cascading. Science is self-correcting, sure, but it's much
easier to avoid errors in the first place. That's an important function of
modern peer review.I'm speaking from experience, of course. Peer review has certainly helped
improve my work. I didn't enjoy having to redo the work, but the end result
was something I could be confident about. Also, I'm only speaking about
publishing in journals, because peer review in conferences is a very different
beast. In my field, of machine learning and artificial intelligence research,
I'd go as far as to say that peer review in conferences is broken, getting
published or not is a lottery and you're better off putting your stuff on arxiv:
less hassle and more people will read it. You might even see your article posted
on HN. When was the last time a paper published on a conference server was
posted on HN? See?