A Reboot of the Legendary Physics Site ArXiv Could Shape Open Science | WIRED

"ArXiv is about to celebrate its 25th birthday. It can now officially rent a car without paying extra, and that means it has to grow up and start thinking about its future. The repository still excels at its primary goal—to quickly and freely disseminate papers about black holes, baryons, and Bayesian statistics—but it runs on old legacy code. “Under the hood, the service is facing significant pressures,” says Oya Rieger, arXiv’s program director.

And so last month the organizers put out a survey, asking users what the site should look like in adulthood. Perhaps most controversially, they asked whether arXiv should change its quality control and allow readers to comment on and annotate papers, adopting some of social media's flashy features. The redesign of one of the earliest open-access repositories could have significant impacts—positive and negative—on the way scientists think about transparency and the future of scientific publishing in the digital age. In other words: prime nerd fight fodder...."