I’m often told I’m "brave" for putting my papers on arXiv before they are accepted for publication. How silly! It’s 100x more likely for academic papers to languish in obscurity than for the ideas in them to be so good that someone would want to steal them. When I ask those paranoid researchers if they’ve ever had an idea stolen, it always turns out to be something that happened to a friend of a friend of a friend. The reason why ideas don’t get stolen is not that academia is a paragon of virtue. It’s more that someone plagiarizing from arXiv has a high risk of getting caught. Besides, ideas are a dime a dozen and everyone else is too obsessed with their own ideas to pay attention to yours. As computing pioneer Howard Aiken said, "Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats." An arguably good reason to not put your paper on arXiv is that it might compromise anonymous review. If your community has such a norm, it makes sense to respect that. But that’s totally different from suppressing your papers because of imagined risks. If your research is publicly funded, you have a moral duty to make it publicly available in a timely way. Don’t put half-baked work on arXiv, but also don’t sit on a draft for years while it’s trudging through the broken peer review system. Often an idea doesn’t work out, and journals don’t accept the paper due to negative results (which is terrible, but that’s a different rant.) So the researcher just buries the draft, leaving others to rediscover the same flawed idea and repeat the work. What a tragic waste! In my experience, for selfish reasons alone, releasing a draft as soon as the paper is ready is absolutely the optimal strategy. Much of my best known work was public for years before it was official. Not-yet-accepted work was a big part of my job talk and even my tenure case. [First posted on Twitter many years ago before I was on LinkedIn.]
So agreeable, I had to repost.
"Besides, ideas are a dime a dozen and everyone else is too obsessed with their own ideas to pay attention to yours." - this is exactly how my PhD mentor and advisor used to put it. Thank you.
I agree.. if the work is polished enough to share, it's good to get it out there sooner rather than later. Especially if you plan to give talks on your research before it's published, it's helpful to have arxiv preprints up: if any questions about attribution or who got the result first come up, you can point to the arxiv publication date.
We have too many papers these days and the highly competitive ones in cs and ai as well as some top ones in acm ieee have become the victim of their own success. Several of us recently spoke about the uniformly random review process - everyone including inexperienced folks review. Even so we submit to the top ranked places. So Joe arxiv does make sense so long as it is protected by patents in some cases.
If your idea is "stolen" from your ArXiv-ed paper, it's easy to establish priority. The only concern is journals who will refuse to accept papers that have been ArXiv-ed, but this was already uncommon a decade ago when I was in the academy and hasn't gotten worse in the interim I hope.
a mentor once said to me "failure is worse than loss of IP". the comment stuck with me
Great share - we know that the refereeing process is so slow and faulty, so getting content out that can be analyzed and discussed in a timely manner is central to not only producing higher quality research, but also actively engaging on topical matters.
ArXiv or Perish! --- Should be the new motto for researchers. Great re-post Arvind. Btw our ACM, IEEE, ASEE papers have been nearly verbatim copied and (re)published - so no worries here ;)
Professor and Head of Industrial Engineering
3dIt is very difficult for junior faculty at many universities to make a career in a peer-reviewed journal obsessed environment with a list of impactful publications in ArXiv.