AlphaXiv: The New Hub for Open Scientific Dialogue

There is tension rooted in publishing research. On the one hand, science flourishes on openness and communication. On the other hand, ensuring high -quality scientific work requires peer reviews that are often long and closed. In 1991, physical Paul Ginsbarg The ARXIV warehouse was created to alleviate some of this tension. The idea is that researchers have a place to download their previous manuscripts before publishing them in a magazine. Preparation is free for everyone, but they were not subject Lids review (There is some examination).
However, ARXIV does not make an open discussion in two directions. Now, two Stanford Students have developed an extension of Arxiv creating a central public field, of some kind, for researchers to discuss preconceived publications. IEEE SICTRUM Talk to one of the two, Rhahan AhmedAbout the project.
Rhahan Ahmed
Rehaan Ahmad is the founder of Alphaxiv, who started as a university project while he was in Stanford UniversityAlong with his colleague, student Raj Al -Baliti.
How does Alphaxiv work?
Rhahan Ahmed: You can change “Arxiv” in the URL to “Alphaxiv”, and opens the paper and there are comments and discussion. You can highlight the sections and leave the comments in the line. There is also a more general main page where you can know the papers others read through the site. It ends up to be a nice way to liquidate interesting papers and what is not.
What prompted you to create the site?
Ahmed: I and Cocreator Raj Palleti were university students in Stanford to conduct research in Robots and Learning reinforcement. We have discovered that many people will have questions about the papers, like us. So I collected small models two or three years ago. It was just sitting on my computer for a while. Then a year later, Raj was offered to him, and he said that we need to make this a general site. We thought about it as a copy of Stack Overflow for the papers.
How difficult is building?
Ahmed: It is amazingly difficult! Our background in research, and one of the most difficult lessons for this project is that writing the search code against the actual code that works are two different things. To get the search code, write something once, you can put it on JaytabNo one will use it – and if they do so, this is their problem is to know that. But here, the site was present for a year and a half, and it has already had many mistakes. The project started on one AWS The server, at any time someone publishes, will become a viral, and the server will decrease.
How do you hope to use alphaxiv?
Ahmed: I see that alphaxiv connects the search world in a more productive way than twitter [now X]. People find errors in the papers here; People will read their opinions. I have seen more productive discussions with authors.
Includes your consultants UDACITY founder Sebastian Thrun And the head of the main Amnesty International in Mita, Yan to be. How do your advisers contribute?
Ahmed: After the first few months of alphaxiv, we have played a lot inside the computer science community. But after discussing the platform [University of Maryland physics professor] Victor Galasky, we realized that his voice and his opinion to direct decisions related to the physics community would be incredibly important. Computer science leaves are usually more interested in Trending/Likes/Filtering on our site, while those interested in physics are usually more orientated towards discussion.
This article appears in the April 2025 issue in the name of “5 questions for Rehaan Ahmed”.
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