> You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?

Pre-prints are basically a mailinglist where you post your paper prior to peer review.

The value over a simple mailinglist is:

1. Stable URL and citation to enable other work and discussions to cite and reference it.

2. Versioning of the paper, allowing updates to be made without having mail out the paper, while allowing everyone to find all prior versions

3. Host for a PDF and data that might be quite large

4. Centralized searchable long term archive of scientific papers

5. Scalability, arxiv gets 30,000 submissions a day, no one wants to receive 30,000 PDFs in their inbox everyday

No so wrong. The oldest journals started as smailing list :)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/information-culture/...

You think that people's findings should be communicated by email? that their email chains are what should go into the permanent record and be cited and printed out and included in journals and such?

would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?

That's how Linux is built.

Science has too many threads to do it successfully though

> would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?

Only quote the relevant part and reply to it, just like this very comment.

And Linux has a large mailing archive of various lists and threads that are searchable and available to everyone and get this: free access

The linux developers' mailing lists are not producing anything like scientific papers...

Kind of arrogant no? Linux kernel development mailing lists are producing something immensely valuable with a much clearer impact on economic indicators than your average scientific paper. Comparing them is hard, but it's patently absurd to say there's nothing being produced compared to scientific papers.

Dunno who you're arguing with, I didn't say they didn't produce anything of value. I said they aren't producing scientific papers. Conversations are not like papers. The scientists have conversations (sometimes on mailing lists!) as well. The analog to scientific papers in the Linux world are... scientific papers. And the occasional essay on the mailing list, which---get this---would be more valuable to humanity if it was subsequently reproduced as a paper with references and explanations and the like.

(Notwithstanding the absurdity of academic publishing, of course.)

Have you never seen a 'personal correspondence' reference?

Yeah but no matter how hard I look I never seem to be able to read anyone else's email. Maybe OpenAI's upcoming models can help me find those references.

the fact that they are sometimes communicated by email doesn't mean that the best way to communicate them is by email. Personal correspondence references are specifically terrible as references since you can't go read them...

If I had the email address of every researcher in my field, I would never send a mass email to them describing my latest goofy idea. I would, however, send my latest goofy idea to a conference with those same reviewers (if I felt it was technically appropriate and correct.)

I mean we use to have newsgroups which basically implemented this.

Which of course is the point: it is in fact quite similar to a mailing list, just with some extra protocol surounding it to make it manageable.

So the attempted snark about it up thread is stupid.

Still inaccurate.

A paper has a (semi-formal) structure, including TITLE, AUTHORS, and the all-important ABSTRACT.

Email guarantees none of those.

Instead of reading everybody's spam or having to have a centralized body decide who gets to send messages to the mailing list, journal editors filter which things are worthy of publication and in which journal such that readers don't have to wade through garbage or uninteresting results.

It’s a special purpose mailing list. The value (your motivations for asking notwithstanding) is in the special purpose, not in the mailing list.