What is the scope for the contents in EarthArXiv

A good question...from one side, I totally agree with you on the need of considering a preprint server not just a repository of under-review (and rejected) papers but also a way to share knowledge at any step of the scientific workflow. On the other side, I think that a minimal effort should be needed to be on a preprint server, otherwise there could be too much "noise" or — in any case — the knowledge might be too much diluted. In any case, I think it worth experimenting we (as researchers) just need to be careful and discussing more often questions like this one.

Thanks Bruce for raising the question. I think it would be awesome to open up for "non-journal" content (just thinking about field trip guides). The challenge would be, to seperate the content, but for sure not impossible.

No strong opinions from my side, I do not worry about the reputation of EarthArXiv, but I wonder whether this would help the authors of such pieces. The main advantage of a preprint server is to make the documents citable, but if there is no intention to publish the text this advantage would not be applicable. Thus such authors are likely better off publishing their work on a blog. They would likely get more attention and more feedback.

A more general discussion would be whether it is good when the distinction between blog posts and scientific articles becomes smaller (or even disappears in a gradual continuum) or whether it may be good to have one forum for informal discussions and one for contributions that are final as well as possible. As a blogger scientist I see value in keeping these two worlds separate, otherwise writing blog posts would become much more like work and the posts may be become more scientific and less readable, but my impression is that many would love to see the distinction gone.

Thank you Bruce for raising the interesting question. Similarly to Victor, I think that the 'opinion' content (i.e. blog-like content and mediated content) as well as the science 'thesis' and 'report' contents should be separated from the 'true' preprints (i.e. science data presented as article).
The reasons are :
i) it is super easy to publish and interact on 'opinion' content related to science (blog, twitter, etc)
ii) there are also numerous platforms where thesis-reports-data can be shared.
EarthArXiv will only stand out and be widely used by the community if we have a clear profile.
However, if people want to deposit preprints of meta-earthscience article this is fully ok to me as long as they don't mix up the science and belief methods.

Dear Bruce,

That's an interesting question you raise. Can it be stated that you're more referring to "the meaning of" a publication and "the science policy" that raised the question on which the publication directly or indirectly tried "to formulate an answer"?

Like e.g. Paleoclimatology tries to figure out the possibility of the Dansgaard-Oesgher cycle or Bond cycle. A clear discovery is, by necessity, in a paper.

Then the question is also.... is our present changed climate additionally related to this Dansgaard business. Of course there is co2. Can't be denied. But on top of that, do we have Dansgaard? What does that mean for treaties like the Paris accord? Must we quicken our pace of finding hospitable planets? Etc....

Sure now in 2018 it looks more like a book of Asimov. But what if the summing up is unstoppable for real?

I would, I think, be in favor of a science guided "what is the meaning of such a finding" discussion.

Dr. Han Geurdes
Geurdes data science kvk64522202

Member of the UNGGIM Private Sector Network.
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This is an interesting question. What is the intersection of, for example, figshare, dryad, thesiscommons.org and Medium (or any blogging platform)? I think the key is in your question, "...does their inclusion affect how the archive is perceived as a place where “real science” is found?"

My only issue is in the ability to find the artefact/content that fits my search criteria, or is related. As long as I (or any user) has the ability to filter content for their desired results, I take no issue with including different content types.

Totally agree with you. May be these documents can be put under a different tag.

Joi Ito recently tweeted about how he cites journal articles more than blogs, even when he notes that the blog content is more valuable. Peer review is the big reason (one hopes). Another thing that reduces the cite-ability of blogs is that they don't come with a pre-formatted citation (who has the time to look up the format?). And they don't have a DOI. Perhaps really great Earth science bloggers can gain some citations by "post-publishing" their best blogs about Earth science here too. Except for post-prints, none of our content is peer reviewed yet (that's kind of the point). We can expect a portion of the content on this site to never find a publisher for various reasons. It's still good to have it here where people can find it IMHO.

Lots of good arguments and good questions posed.
I occasionally write blog posts / popular science articles, but I never write them with the expectation that they will get cited somehow. It's often the other way around. Most of my blog articles are published for their timeliness to discuss some early ideas about an impactful event (e.g. a large earthquake), or to highlight and summarise some new peer-reviewed scientific results. I will always try to get the post published somewhere where it gets seen the most (e.g. newspaper online blog, learned society blog etc).
I've never tried to submit an opinion piece to a scientific journal, but perhaps this is where some of the examples that @bcaron suggests could go.
Overall though, I'm relatively agnostic and it would be cool if EarthArXiv can host this kind of work in a streamlined way that is clearly differentiated from a purely scientific (e.g. peer-reviewed) piece of work.
Also, we should be careful of non-credible and non-qualified "scientists" submitting their opinion pieces. Some areas of geoscience are quite prone to this kind of external work (e.g. earthquake prediction, climate change) from charlatans and hobby scientists, so we still need to keep a close eye on what is submitted.

Since Earth science bloggers can also get an account with Figshare and post their work there (to get a formatted citation and a DOI), perhaps that's a better solution, since EarthArXiv has people who need to read everything that is submitted... don't want to give the vetting crew more work if it's not productive.