There is an inherent tension in the dissemination of research. On one hand, science thrives on openness and communication. On the other, ensuring high-quality scientific work requires peer reviews that are often lengthy and closed. In 1991, physicist Paul Ginsparg created the arXiv repository to alleviate some of that tension. The idea is that researchers have a place to upload their preprint manuscripts before they are published in a journal. The preprints are free to all but have not undergone peer review (there is some screening).

However, arXiv doesn’t facilitate open, two-way discussion. Now, two Stanford students have developed an extension of arXiv that creates a centralized public square, of sorts, for researchers to discuss preprints. IEEE Spectrum spoke with one of the two, Rehaan Ahmad, about the project.

How does alphaXiv work?

Rehaan Ahmad: You can change the “arXiv” in the URL to “alphaXiv,” and it opens up the paper and there’s comments and discussion. You can highlight sections and leave in-line comments. There’s also a more general home page where you can see what papers other people are reading through the site. It ends up being a nice way to filter for what papers are interesting and what aren’t.

What motivated you to create the site?

Ahmad: My cocreator Raj Palleti and I were undergrads at Stanford doing research in robotics and reinforcement learning. We figured a lot of people would have questions on papers, like us. So I put together a little mock-up two or three years ago. It was just sitting on my computer for a while. And then a year afterward I showed it to Raj, and he said we need to make this a public site. We thought of it as a version of Stack Overflow for papers.

How difficult was it to build?

Ahmad: Surprisingly difficult! Our background is in research, and one of the harder lessons for this project is that writing research code versus actual code that works are two different things. For research code, you write something once, you put it on GitHub, no one will use it—and if they do, it’s their problem to figure out. But here, the site has been around for a year and a half, and only recently have a lot of the bugs been kind of hashed out. The project started out on a single AWS server, and anytime someone would post about it, it would go viral, and the server would go down.

How do you hope alphaXiv will be used?

Ahmad: I see alphaXiv as just connecting the world of research in a way that’s more productive than Twitter [now X]. People find mistakes in papers here; people will read their opinions. I have been seeing more productive discussions with the authors.

Your advisors include Udacity cofounder Sebastian Thrun and Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun. How have your advisors contributed?

Ahmad: After the first few months of operating alphaXiv, we circulated a lot within the computer-science community. But after discussing the platform with [University of Maryland physics professor] Victor Galitski, we realized having his voice and opinion to guide decisions that were relevant to the physics community would be incredibly important. Those interested in computer-science papers are usually more interested in the trending/likes/filtering aspect of our site, whereas those interested in physics are usually more discussion-oriented.

This article appears in the April 2025 issue as “5 Questions for Rehaan Ahmad.”