[Other posts in this series: 2,3,4.]
I had the chance to have dinner tonight with Paul Ginsparg of arXiv fame, and he graciously gave me some feedback on a very speculative idea that I’ve been kicking around: augmenting — or even replacing — the current academic article model with collaborative documents.
Even after years of mulling it over, my thoughts on this aren’t fully formed. But I thought I’d share my thinking, however incomplete, after incorporating Paul’s commentary while it is still fresh in my memory. First, let me start with some of the motivating problems as I see them:
- People still reference papers from 40 years ago for key calculations (not just for historical interest or apportioning credit). They often have such poor typesetting that they are hard to read, don’t have machine-readable text, no URL links, etc.
- Getting oriented on a topic often requires reading a dozen or more scattered papers with varying notation, where the key advances (as judged with hindsight) are mixed in with material that is much less important.
- More specifically, papers sometimes have a small crucial idea that is buried in tangential details having to do with that particular author’s use for the idea, even if the idea has grown way beyond the author.
- Some authors could contribute the key idea, but others could contribute clarity of thought, or make connections to other fields. In general these people may not know each other, or be able to easily collaborate.
- There aren’t enough good review articles.
for some dark matter masses between 
and 
. This is well below the scale of solar neutrinos cross sections. Writing this paper would require understanding shielding from the Earth and the satellite, the time stability of conventional sources of decoherence, and the unusual quadratic scaling of the coherent scattering enhancement that appears in the appendix 
