Introducing alphaXiv
I’ve been busy all day so just have time to mention an interesting new development to do with arXiv. There is a new site called alphaXiv, which is a forum for anyone to comment line-by-line on arXiv papers. It also allows you to “get responses directly from authors of the paper or from established research teams from Stanford and Harvard”, which seems to imply that authors can’t be from established research teams unless they are from Stanford or Harvard!
Anyway, you can try alphaXiv here.
I think this is a great idea in principle; it will be fascinating to see how it works out in practice. My main reservation stems from (i) it seems that there is no moderation of comments and (ii) anonymous comments are allowed; there is therefore a significant danger of abusive behaviour as is often the case on, e.g., Reddit.
I’d welcome reactions via the comments box below from anyone who has tried this already or who has thoughts about it generally!
In the Dark 
March 12, 2024 at 10:37 am
I think this is a very interesting idea, although of course I can’t say whether this specific implementation is well done / likely to succeed.
I claimed authorship of one of my papers on the site, and I’m also “following” that paper there. I’m curious to see what that means in practice. If anyone feels like leaving a test comment on that paper, please do so. I’ll report back what it looks like from the author’s end.
The paper I’ve claimed and am following is https://alphaxiv.org/abs/1610.03345v2
April 1, 2024 at 2:26 am
Hey there, I’m one of the co-creators of alphaXiv and just stumbled upon this, thanks for sharing!
For some more context on the project: we are a team of CS undergrads at Stanford that initially built the site for a final project in our web-dev class. After the final project, the site was initially used internally by a couple research labs and classes at Stanford. A lot of the issues like allowing anonymity and lack of moderation features were remnants of this time. Over the last few months we have been working on making the site more conducive to high-quality comments and more robust to all the issues that come with being completely open to the public. This meant removing anonymity, allowing users to flag comments, showing a user’s university affiliation, and more (these changes are now live on the current site). We are currently working on ORCID integration which should be done in the coming week. Our project advisor, Prof Sebastian Thrun, has been equally vocal about ensuring this site doesn’t end up like Reddit/4Chan/Twitter as that would clearly do much more harm to the research community than good. To this end, we’d more than welcome any other suggestions you have – feel free to email contact@alphaxiv.org and we can set up a short call to talk more!
The LinkedIn post from a month ago that initially got the word out for us came a bit prematurely/without our knowledge. It was unfortunate timing, as a lot of these changes above were in development and not ready for release at the time. As of today, however, they are all live on the site.
Finally, I do apologize for the inaccurate wording on the homepage about “established research teams”. For the longest time, our site actually didn’t have a home page. When the LinkedIn post came out, we rushed to throw together a homepage without much thinking of the exact wording. This is fixed now 🙂