The reviews section is out of beta!

Question

Some of you may have noticed the new button in the sidebar, and the updated text for the news section.

Yes, the "submit paper" plugin is now available to all users with at least 100 reputation, with some major improvements : ) This is complemented by a tool (accessible to moderators) that allows for the editing of submission header data (referee/vote instructions) in case a user submits incorrect data in the plug-in.

Those with lesser than 100 reputation can still request submission creation - the thread is still linked from right below the "Submit paper" link.

How can I help?

The most obvious is of course to submit a paper (or for < 100 rep users, continue to request submission creation). Besides this, 100+ rep users may also help out with acting on submission creation requests to quicken the pace at which these are accepted (on a related note, users are also requested to help out in community moderation).

Also, users are also requested to help re-categorise submissions. Creation of new categories is not yet accessible to non-admins, so you may use this threat to suggest category paths (e.g. refereeing/gr-qc/quant-gr/cqg-var/lqg/lqg-bh-entropy) for an existing submission and list down the submissions that could go into that category path. The category path could for example -

• start with the arxiv category (e.g. gr-qc),
• then either the arxiv sub-category or another such an equivalent topic (e.g. quant-gr; quantum gravity), 
• then narrow it down to some closely related theories or fields of study (e.g. cqg-var; Canonical QG and variants)
• then narrow it down to a single theory or field of study (e.g. lqg; Loop Quantum Gravity)
• then pin it down to a niche probem or property (e.g. lqg-bh-entropy; the problem of BH entropy in LQG)

This system is not at all absolute, and only a sort of guide as to how such a category path may look like. Feel free to propose a category path below in the answers.

What's next for the reviews section?

The next step for the reviews section would be locally hosting contributions, so that contributors may host their papers directly on PhysicsOverflow. Besides the ability to upload PDFs as submissions, there will also be a page where all recently uploaded PDFs appear, to track spam.

After this, I hope we'll be able to link with ShareLaTeX, a very rapidly growing online open-source LaTeX editor, so that a user may submit to PhysicsOverflow directly from ShareLaTeX (they seem quite keen on these things, they already have an option to publish to ArXiV).

But I suppose PolarKernel may need a break - he's written more than half the entire length of the Q2A code, which is 36000 lines of code. Now those 36000 lines were developed by a number of people (Q2A is a community project, our fork isn't yet, as the code is still very specialised for the needs of PhysicsOverflow), which brings me to another point - we need a second system developer!

What's next for public beta?

Hm, so does this mean we're out of beta, now? Not yet. To come out of beta, we'll first need to decide upon some of the site design-related questions listed under the "Public beta tools" in the sidebar, such as 404 page design, vote button design, etc. and the important feature requests should be completed. Additionally, we need some more tag descriptions, and most of the submissions need to be organised by threaded category.

In other news, read the summary of our talk on PhysicsOverflow at the 5th Offtopicarium held in Wegierska Gorkha, Poland last week.

Answer 1

It would go a long way to allowing more imported papers if we added the default view for the reviews page the categories, similar to arxiv. Also, it might be time then to ask personal friends you know to share their referee reports.

Regarding this, I think we can also take a minute or two to add a "crowdsource" money thing, where we can have money bounties on papers. Placing a money bounty on a review will get the paper visibility naturally, and might work to get busy people here. I'd be willing to personally place $100 bounties for certain reviews to get the process started.

The money bounty will definitely get attention, the moment you pay someone, even a symbolic amount, you have an free advertiser for life, as this person will tell their friends etc.

Tree view by topic, though, will definitely make us look more professional, although at the moment, it might not need to be the default because we are not big enough.

Comments

Regarding the treeview, do you mean the reviews page should contain something like the Categories page, but only for the reviews section and it's subsections?

For money bounties, I support the idea in the long run, but I think that in order for it to be successful, the site needs to be larger, and this will take time.

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Give someone \$100, for some serious answer with scientific content, and I think you'll be surprised how much attention and participation you'll get. Money bounties are a really strong attention getter, and we can siphon off a lot of people, not because they need the money, but as a point of pride--- like getting a check from Erdos was a point of pride.

I was thinking of putting up my own money for this on a few problems, \$100 each. It doesn't take much to get attention, people talk about cash prizes, like the Clay problems, but they talk about them also whenn if they are \$50 prizes, so you get more bang for your buck by offering 20,000 \$50 prizes on 20,000 problems rather than one \$1,000,000 prize on one problem.