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PhysicsOverflow
Type of site
Question and answer
Open peer review
OwnerRoger Cattin[1]
Created byAbhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir, Rahel Knoepfel and Roger Cattin
URLphysicsoverflow.org Edit this at Wikidata
CommercialNo
RegistrationYes
Content license
User contributions under CC BY-SA 3.0[2]

PhysicsOverflow is a physics website that serves as a post-publication open peer review platform for research papers in physics, as well as a collaborative blog and online community of physicists. It allows users to ask, answer and comment on graduate-level physics questions, post and review manuscripts from ArXiv (which lists PhysicsOverflow discussion pages among its trackbacks[4]) and other sources, and vote on both forms of content.

In addition to the two primary forms of content, the PhysicsOverflow community also welcomes discussions on unsolved problems, and hosts a chat section for discussions on topics generally of interest to physicists and students of physics, such as those related to recent events in physics, physics academia, and the publishing process. While there are no explicit rules for civility, the community tends to be hostile to uncivil discussion, and tangential discussions are quickly moved to chat.

History

PhysicsOverflow was started in April 2014 as a physics-equivalent of MathOverflow by Rahel Knöpfel, a physics PhD at the University of Rostock, high-school student Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir, and Roger Cattin, a retired professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland.[3] The site was eventually expanded to include a Reviews section in October 2014.[5]

Moderation practices

PhysicsOverflow is well-known for its liberal moderation policy and hesitation to block contributors except for spam, as reflected in the website's bill of "user rights".[6][7] The content is largely community-moderated, much like MathOverflow, although exceptions have been recorded.[8][9]

Although the site's moderation policy is publicly available as part of the moderator manual, the site has been criticised for the excessive dispersion of policy-related material, such as the FAQ, the Bill of Rights, the moderator list and the Community Moderation threads , leading to reduced transparency.[10][11][7][12][9][13][14] In response, the site's administrators posted a bulletin of all moderation-related content on the site on the homepage.

Technical details

The PhysicsOverflow discus as it appears in the PhysicsOverflow logo.

PhysicsOverflow runs Question2Answer, an open-source Q&A software, with a custom theme and several plugins and patches.[15] Some of its plugins have been used by other Question2Answer websites, such as the Open Science Q&A and the Physics Problems Q&A.[16][17]

Usage

Quantcast records around 3000 monthly visitors and between 20,000 and 50,000 global page views to PhysicsOverflow every month, over half of whom are located in four countries: the United States (26.8%), India (9.2%), the United Kingdom (8.5%), and Germany (6.4%).[18] However, according to PhysicsOverflow's own data, only around 1500 users actually contribute content to the site, and 440 are active at a given point in time.[19]

Recognition

The creation of PhysicsOverflow was well-received by the MathOverflow community.[20] PhysicsOverflow was also featured at the 5th Offtopicarium[21] and World Scientific's Asia-Pacific Physics News Letter.[22]

  • John Baez suggested the website as a platform for discussing research-level physics questions.[23]
  • Greg Bernhardt, the founder of PhysicsForums, acknowledged the site as a "very interesting development for the physics discussion communities".[24]
  • Arnold Neumaier, a professor at the University of Vienna, employs PhysicsOverflow as the platform for discussion about his Theoretical Physics FAQ.[25]
  • String theorist Lubos Motl referred to the website as a "very promising competition [to Physics Stack Exchange]".[26]
  • The University of Stavenger's cosmology department commented that PhysicsOverflow "seems to implement some interesting ideas", and that "it makes some sense the [sic] review the reviewing process".[27]
  • Urs Schreiber publicised the site, claiming it could act as a catalyst to make physics academia more open like mathematics.[28][29]

See also

References

  1. ^ http://physicsoverflow.org
  2. ^ a b https://physicsoverflow.org/8347/history-of-physicsoverflow
  3. ^ https://physicsoverflow.org/30425/we-have-arxiv-trackbacks?show=30425#q30425
  4. ^ https://physicsoverflow.org/24235/the-reviews-section-is-out-of-beta
  5. ^ https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6196/what-is-physics-overflow-and-how-is-it-linked-to-physics-se
  6. ^ a b https://physicsoverflow.org/user-rights
  7. ^ https://physicsoverflow.org/31863/violation-of-policy-to-close-questions
  8. ^ a b https://physicsoverflow.org/review
  9. ^ https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_ra1Ss1E-rWN3cyRC1zalAtT1U/edit
  10. ^ https://physicsoverflow.org/faq
  11. ^ https://physicsoverflow.org/users/special
  12. ^ https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6196/what-is-physics-overflow-and-how-is-it-linked-to-physics-se#comment25091_6213
  13. ^ https://physicsoverflow.org/22268/physics-overflow-moderators-what-their-exact-role-and-powers
  14. ^ https://physicsoverflow.org/faq#a4809
  15. ^ https://openscience.uni-bielefeld.de/768/how-do-i-regain-access-to-my-imported-account
  16. ^ https://blog.wikimedia.de/author/christopher_schwarzkopf/
  17. ^ https://www.quantcast.com/physicsoverflow.org?country=CN
  18. ^ https://physicsoverflow.org/statistics
  19. ^ http://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1608/physicsoverflow-just-went-live
  20. ^ https://physicsoverflow.org/22788/we-have-a-talk-at-the-offtopicarium?show=22788#q22788
  21. ^ http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2251158X15000193
  22. ^ http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html
  23. ^ http://motls.blogspot.in/2013/08/discussion-on-old-and-new-theoretical.html?m=1
  24. ^ http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/physfaq/physics-faq.html
  25. ^ http://motls.blogspot.in/2014/05/physics-overflow-is-live.html
  26. ^ https://www.facebook.com/uiscosmology/posts/1228470267242602
  27. ^ https://plus.google.com/+UrsSchreiber/posts/SoWhSAqmUJ1
  28. ^ https://www.quora.com/Whats-your-impression-of-PhysicsOverflow/answer/Sebastian-Schacher
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