PhysicsOverflow is a physics website that serves as a post-publication open peer review^[2] 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^[3]) and other sources, and vote on both forms of content.

Quick Facts Type of site, Owner ...

PhysicsOverflow

Type of site	Question and answer Open peer review
Owner	Roger Cattin[1]
Created by	Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir, Rahel Knoepfel and Roger Cattin
URL	physicsoverflow.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Launched	April 2014; 10 years ago (2014-04)[2]
Content license	User contributions under CC BY-SA 3.0[2]

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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.^[2]

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.^[2] The site was initially a mere question-and-answer forum, as it was started by users dissatisfied by the policies of the Physics Stack Exchange, but it was eventually expanded to include a Reviews section in October 2014.^[4]

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".^[5][6] The content is largely community-moderated, much like MathOverflow, although exceptions have been recorded.^[7][8]

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.^[9][10] In response, the site's administrators posted a bulletin of all moderation-related content on the site on the homepage.

PhysicsOverflow runs Question2Answer, an open-source Q&A software, with a custom theme and several plugins and patches.^[2] Some of its plugins have been used by other Question2Answer websites, such as the Open Science Q&A and the Physics Problems Q&A.^[11][12]

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%).^[13] 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.^[14]

The creation of PhysicsOverflow was well-received by the MathOverflow community.^[15] PhysicsOverflow was also featured at the 5th Offtopicarium^[16] and World Scientific's Asia-Pacific Physics News Letter.^[17]

• John Baez suggested the website as a platform for discussing research-level physics questions.^[18]
• Greg Bernhardt, the founder of Physics Forums, acknowledged the site as a "very interesting development for the physics discussion communities".^[19]
• Arnold Neumaier, a professor at the University of Vienna, employs PhysicsOverflow as the platform for discussion about his Theoretical Physics FAQ.^[20]
• String theorist Lubos Motl referred to the website as a "very promising competition [to Physics Stack Exchange]".^[21]
• The University of Stavanger's cosmology department commented that PhysicsOverflow "seems to implement some interesting ideas", and that "it makes some sense the [sic] review the reviewing process".^[22]
• Urs Schreiber publicised the site, claiming it could act as a catalyst to make physics academia more open like mathematics.^[23]

• MathOverflow
• Stack Exchange
• nLab