Opinion
Luís Batalha: Open journals can match Science and Nature in prestige
“And I think it's totally possible that these open journals get to a point where they have you know, a reputation like science or nature. As long as you convince people to, you know, publish their papers on these journals, it's, there's nothing about science or…”
Insight
Luís Batalha: Machine learning moves too fast to wait for academic journals
“Archive is, is super important because the papers are, the new papers are coming out at such a high rate that people don't wait before the papers go to journals, before they start working on top of it and using the stuff that other people discover.”
Insight
Luís Batalha: Initial discovery papers are not always the most impactful
“One of the things that we noticed, or at least I noticed from reading papers is that sometimes it's not like the discovery paper that is the most impactful paper.”
Insight
Luís Batalha: Citation metrics misalign incentives for accessible scientific writing
“If the metric is just number of citations, sometimes it's not aligned to making the paper understandable and comprehensible to a large audience.”
Insight
Luís Batalha: Educational textbooks should be open-sourced and updated incrementally
“It would make sense for books to be annotated and also be open source so that in that sense you would just you know, commit a new chapter a new explanation for that and keep all the other chapters and then just change that bit. Instead of having to write a new…”
Insight
Luís Batalha: Paper authors find answering questions easier than annotating
“Every time we talk with an author, I think it's easier for them to answer questions about their papers than to annotate the paper.”
Insight
Luís Batalha: Famous tenured scientists are required to legitimize open journals
“It's probably the way to get these open, open journals to be as popular as nature or science is to convince Really, people that already have a tenure are really famous scientists to publish on those journals. You already have your position. You already have yo…”
Assertion Supported
Luís Batalha: A blog comment unlocked Terence Tao's Erdős discrepancy proof
“Terence Tau the Fields Medalist, was trying to solve the problem, and he put it on his blog that he was trying a certain approach to solve the problem, and then there was this guy from Germany that just wrote a comment there, like the size of a tweet, and he s…”
Disclosure
Luís Batalha: Fermat's growth strategy starts with solving arXiv pain points
“Our idea was initially we wanted really to convince people to install the Chrome extension. And so let's solve the hair on fire problems that they are describing here. And then once we have people using the Chrome extension and then we can expand into like ope…”
Insight
Luís Batalha: Explaining technical papers expands the audience and invites more questions
“The more you annotate a paper, there are more people there are that are at the edge of starting to understand what the paper is about. So you start getting more and more questions because the circle expands, and then you just have more people that are, like, s…”
Assertion Supported
Luís Batalha: Historic physics discovery papers were only one or two pages
“In the sixties and all, like, through the 20th century, All these discoveries and all these papers were mostly like one, two pages. And yeah, like the, it's so fun. It's, and also fairly simple to read. But the discovery of the Neutron, it's like maybe one col…”
