Bob Novella

Obviously, I'm a huge fan of the physics papers.

I can't even count how many I've gone through.

The archive.org website was launched in 91, so quite a while ago, and it was actually one of the pioneers

for this this common idea now of preprints as a free alternative to journal articles and this has been uh very helpful i'm sure for a lot of science communicators very it's been very helpful for me i mean sometimes um you know i see an interesting study that i that i've got to that i i can't find anywhere and and i don't want to pay dozens to hundreds of dollars to read this one article

for one talk, and it's so frustrating because I'm not going to spend that money.

And sometimes I get lucky and I can find earlier pre-print versions of that paper, and that comes in handy.

And often it's just like very minor changes are made.

So it's essentially the paper that has actually been eventually peer-reviewed.

But it's frustrating.

Now, of course, archive papers are not peer-reviewed, right?

That's a hugely important caveat.

But did you know that they have 300 expert volunteers that go through and vet every paper that comes in?

And they're getting a lot of papers.

I mean, they're talking now this year they expect to get 25,000 submissions per month.

So these 300 volunteers, these expert volunteers, go through and they make sure that every paper is appropriate and topical.

And they also remove anything that's plagiarized or non-scientific.

So they're wiping away some of these that will not work.

So astronomer Ralph Wegers, he's the chair of the Archive Editorial Council, said that most rejections are so obviously rubbish that it takes no more than just glancing over the paper, like a four-page paper that has 50 subsections in it, some of which do not contain any text.

I mean, it's like, really?

That's what you're going to submit when people are doing that.