Comment/Feedback section in article page

Yeah, Hypothes.is would be DOPE AS!!

I think comment/feedback on preprints deposited on EarthArXiv would be indeed very interesting.
However I'm not sure if comment/feedback should happen/be hosted within EarthArXiv itself. The best way might indeed be a linking of EarthArXiv DOI to another community-based / open access / non-profit structure that has all the tech frame AND the staff support for moderation. Because we all know that inapropriate comments by trolls always happen online! Such inapropriate public comments linked to our preprints could act as a strong rebutal for authors to actually deposit their preprints. Potential inaproriate comments could also act badly on the 'seriousness' of our platform. Inaproriate comments could even be used by hostile actors to have EarthArXiv 'looking' bad. Thus I feel we need to fully think/prepare a policy and a moderated structure before we enter in this process.

More fundamentally, we also need to think deeper about what comment/feedback on our preprints would mean. To my opinion, it would mean that EarthArXiv would become closer to the function of OpenAccess/OpenDiscussion journals.

I strongly believe we authors-scientists should get the control of our publications meaning on the long term on the entire publication process (because we are already doing all the jobs of writing-reviewing-editing). And building a strong EarthArXiv platform is a key part of this idea! But in order to become strong, I believe we need to first focuss on preprints and convince our community to broadly use it.

Thus I think we shouldn't rush on adding comments/feedbacks, in order not to dilute our main goal, particularly when everything still is at the beginning of the process.

Sorry for the long text.

Stéphanie has pretty well summarised my concerns with allowing comments. In principle, it sounds good, but in practice there are a lot of potential pitfalls. I think there is a big difference between a pre-print server and an open review / open discussion journal. Such journals are definitely valuable, but is that what EarthArXiv wants to be? If so, that is a whole other undertaking and not a trivial one.

My inclination is to stay centred on the core idea of being a pre-print server.

@christopherjackson3 public road map link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1SocElbBjc_Nhme4-SJv2_zytBd1ys8R5aZDb3POe94c

Thanks @mattspitzer for the info. This is helpful to see, and I'll bookmark this page and share it via Twitter if that's OK. I see it's view-only. So, as Stephanie points out, this could be a bit of hornet's nest. But I realy think that such negative exchanges are very rare, and that the positives massively outweigh the negatives. Also, I'd hate to thin a (the?) key piece of functionality wasn't implemented because of the bad behaviour of a few scholars. In situtations like this, I firmly believe that people who behave well shouldn't be puninished by, in this case, taking away key functionality. Instead, we should tackle the aggressive bullies, pointing out that their behaviour is absolutely not acceptable. Placing the burden on the well-behaved people seems unfair to me, and not a way to change behaviours in the long-term.

Dear Chris, I fully agree with you. We don't want to loose an opportunity because of marginal behavior! But the comments/feedbacks function should come with a very short statement that describes what we expect and what we forbid.

My immediate response was: yes, wonderful.

However, to keep the discussion at a scientific level, we would really need moderation and if EarthArXiv becomes a big success, this will be a major task. It is a task that can be split up. I could do the climate part and once that gets to big the climate observations part. With EarthArXiv getting bigger, we would hopefully also have more people to do the moderation.

My experience as blogger suggest that just moderation is not enough. To keep the level high, pre-moderation is the best. If comments are published first, it is harder to remove them again, people may already have responded and all that makes the level go down. Pre.moderation is also less work. My blog is pre-moderated and I do not often have to moderate; people know their comment will not appear if below the standard. On blogs with moderation after the fact the moderation is more work.

Should also be a system that can handle spam.

I wanted to write Hypothes.is (web annotation) can always be used, but it looks as if the OSF somehow made that hard. This link somehow does no work:
https://via.hypothes.is/https://eartharxiv.org/pfb7u

Climate Feedback is using Hypothes.is to review press articles. Here is an example annotations by Climate Feedback to have an idea how such comments would look like.

At the moment Hypothes.is or any other web annotation software does not have moderation functions yet. They are working on it.

Should comments be op-in? Would otherwise comments scare some people away?

While I write much about science and at conferences colleagues tell me they read my blog, getting comments from scientists is quite rare. Those that do are typically active on social media. This group is also likely nor representative for the scientific community in such matters. I can imagine that other scientists have much less appetite for public bar fights.

Moderation is probably a necessary thing - on my very little blogging I get occasional rashes of spam bots advertising cheap imitation Nike shoes, for example. But whether EarthArxiv would want to get involved in hosting it, maintaining links to deleted or disputed posts etc is a separate question.
One option for consideration might be for the (corresponding) author of a submission to include a link to their choice of site, or the statement that "Comments are not accepted." And they - the corresponding author(s) - take on the task of moderating. There's an element of turning poaches into gamekeepers here, but I doubt that sincere researchers are going to go around deleting all comments of even the slightest degree of criticism. Why in that case, publish at all?
If particular sites show themselves to be particularly popular ... well integrating them into a later version might then at least b based on statistics, not a seemingly arbitrary choice.
Down-side : to comment, some people may need to establish accounts on NameOfDiscussionService. Irritating, but many of us have many of these accounts already, and I'm pretty sure that a small number of most-popular targets would soon become clear leaders.
Two cents worth - if that.

Corresponding authors as guardians of the discussion looks like a bad idea to me. Suppose, the claim is that one can safely use models to fill in the gaps of measurements. Now, a mathematician discovers that the basic differential equation has not a unique solution. So, care must be taken using the model that is based on the differential equation.

Now, if the corresponding author of the model paper does not want to handle this particular methodological criticism, he or she can exclude the difficult explanation from the discussion, right? Not every Geochemist is well versed in nonlinear differential equations, linearized with measured integral equations. Moreover, the criticism is theoretical. The question can be raised... how bad is that methodological flaw in numerical terms. The mathematical researcher cannot answer that. He just knows that there are, in principle, countable infinite not mutually matching solutions.

Result is most likely that the model is widely used without checking if the interpolated values belong to the same branch of solution. Perhaps political measures are taken based on not properly checked model conclusions. Enemies of those measures will find the methodological criticism one day and raise counter political measures.

Is that bad... perhaps. Is it unscientific... yes, I believe it is.

A long and winding story just to show how extremely complicated a fair judgement is in a controversial discussion.

An alternative could be to have comments that are send to the authors and not published below the preprints. That would be sufficient for feedback to the authors. Publishing the comments would make the preprint server more into a discussion journal, a place to review manuscripts.