As an academic and regular submitter to arXiv, this is an eminently sensible policy. I like that it's per-submitter and not per-author, that means that the big labs with large collaborations shouldn't be terribly put out (more authors = more submission budget).
I hope something like this could also be adopted for some of our larger conferences - the absolute limits on co-authorship are what seem to cause the most grumbles.
dede4metal 15 hours ago [-]
Not really since large collaborations use a single email address to submit to arXiv, see for example CMS papers.
elashri 13 hours ago [-]
It is the usually that LHC experiments (and HEP in general) secretariat office is the one handling the submission to arXiv and journals per policy (avoid people conflicts and managing it centrally because the papers under the name of the collaboration not individuals. Sometimes papers can also be submitted by author directly but not the physics results papers and papers which is signed off by the whole collaborations (computing and ML stuff mainly).
I would think arXiv can work something out for these cases.
frumiousirc 12 hours ago [-]
> (and HEP in general)
Not for any neutrino experiment I know of. There are paper committees that govern publication but the actual preprint submission to arXiv is always done by one of the authors.
> I would think arXiv can work something out for these cases.
Yes, I also expect special cases would be defined.
mapt 11 hours ago [-]
That could readily change, but established large collaborations could also simply be exempted.
totetsu 21 hours ago [-]
It seems there is a lot of this kind of AI risk. I'm trying to find the right label for it. Something that was a common good, that worked at a human scale, is now made unviable because automation has pushed it beyond what it can handle and still be useful.
monideas 8 hours ago [-]
This applies also to things at the human scale, when some wider group gets access to a common good.
Internet forums when internet access was only available to college students vs Internet forums today (called Eternal September, September being the month when new Freshman got access to the internet, Eternal September being when everyone in the developed world did)
lhd1 18 hours ago [-]
several authors including the creator of arxiv, Paul Ginsparg, foretell a future in which we "increasingly rely on status markers such as author
pedigree and institutional affiliation as signals of quality, ironically
counteracting the democratizing effects of LLMs on scientific production."
I think this is a very plausible outcome of a flood of preprints. Because there's only so much time in a day and are we going to spend it on papers by less established people who we do not trust? It's a pity. If the science is good what does it matter who produced it.
Alternatively perhaps robust AI powered review pipelines eventually come into being. At that point the system as a whole would resemble a semi-supervised GAN setup optimizing for scientific paper quality. It might end up producing good results. (An absolute nightmare for the year or two leading up to that though.)
logicchains 16 hours ago [-]
Some government should fund a preprint server where the submissions are screened by open weight models. Ultimately AI prescreening is far more scalable than human prescreening.
strangecasts 14 hours ago [-]
Thus biasing submissions' language and content towards those most palatable to those open-weight models, creating further incentives to generate articles wholesale with them, and incentives against publishing null findings
pjc50 10 hours ago [-]
But is it any good?
toast0 16 hours ago [-]
Perhaps Eternal September
pkoird 20 hours ago [-]
tragedy of the commons.
totetsu 17 hours ago [-]
Is it just the same as that?
fizzbuzzbarbazz 12 hours ago [-]
Well, somewhat. it's the same underlying behavior of individuals/organizations seeking advantage, leading to overuse and breakage. ..and, similarly, the resolution is in individuals backing public will. that is, someone (arxiv) takes an interest in the commons (scientific paper publishing) and curates/controls a segment of it, actively preventing abuse.
QuadmasterXLII 11 hours ago [-]
A tragedy for every commons!
sasaf5 20 hours ago [-]
Abuse.
computerfriend 16 hours ago [-]
> There is also a marked increase in dense, AI-written papers. AI tools are making it easy for authors to flood arXiv and other repositories with these low-value papers.
arXiv should ban these submitters.
glitchc 9 hours ago [-]
How to detect them?
bigmadshoe 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not up to date but apparently pangram and similar tools are very reliable these days for copy-pasted AI text.
14 hours ago [-]
bryan0 1 days ago [-]
some highlights:
> In September of 2016, arXiv received 9,869 submissions. In September of 2024, arXiv received 20,569 submissions. This September, arXiv received 40,363 submissions, which in turn generated almost 9,000 support tickets for arXiv staff and moderators.
> arXiv now limits submitters to up to two submissions per calendar month, with a limit of three total active submissions at any given time.
sedan_baklazhan 13 hours ago [-]
So are we in singularity already? The research count is rising exponentially. /s
bonoboTP 23 hours ago [-]
Arxiv papers are not supposed to signify anything. The only reason that people may derive some kind of career benefits is because Google Scholar indexes it and counts it towards the h-index etc. All that metric-based career-optimization going on is quite broken anyway, so this is fixing things from the wrong end as well. (The better end: stop hiring and promoting people based on Arxiv paper counts, so there is no incentive to flood it)
The hosting cost side I can understand, though they received quite some funding recently, but I assume it's not going towards actually running the site, but to who knows what broader impacts and so on.
Moderation for Arxiv is a silly idea. It already shouldn't be taken as a quality signal that something is able to be up on Arxiv. Obviously they should remove illegal stuff, but beyond that, requiring moderation is a misunderstanding of their role and reason for popularity.
If hosting is too expensive, I guess an alternative aggregator could also arise. With just metadata and a hash of the pdf that can be hosted anywhere, and as the sumbitter, if you move the file, you can change the URL.
The main reason for Arxiv's existence is the timestamping and the easy referencing. (Though I admit that the stable hosting is also a pretty important part, but they mention moderation effort as the reason, not the hosting costs.)
Academia is losing sight of the forest for the trees, can't see more than an arm's length ahead of their noses.
kragen 22 hours ago [-]
> Moderation for Arxiv is a silly idea. It already shouldn't be taken as a quality signal that something is able to be up on Arxiv.
It sounds like you're advocating for arXiv to become viXra. On https://vixra.org/all/2610 the second paper is currently "Correct Interpretation of the Great Discoveries in Particle Physics: I. Reconsidering the Higgs Boson via Vedic Vortex Structure", followed by a paper arguing that classical electrodynamics is bogus, "Gauss’s Flux Theorem Does not Hold in Time-Varying Electric Fields", and then "On the Boundary Problem in the Origins of Matter, Life, and Consciousness".
I don't think arXiv will continue to receive "quite some funding" if this is what it contains.
miki123211 22 hours ago [-]
Vixra suffers from the "Witch Hunt problem" because Arxiv exists.
If Arxiv was the only game in town and it allowed everything, the result would be more like GitHub or Substack. That is, you wouldn't be able to trust everything hosted there, and a lot of it would be low-quality promotional garbage, with filtering moved to a different layer.
You could do some kind of karma system for example, where the prestige of your institution, your own karma, number of citations, papers published in high impact-factor journals etc would affect karma weight. You could have journals be like "awesome-x" lists on Github, with authors who have already been published there able to endorse other papers. I believe the mathematics community is trying that.
bonoboTP 22 hours ago [-]
> You could do some kind of karma system for example, where the prestige of your institution, your own karma, number of citations, papers published in high impact-factor journals etc would affect karma weight.
The story that academia likes to tell itself about itself is that it is skeptical and iconclastic and objectively evaluates each piece of science on its own virtues and it doesn't matter who says it. A wrong thing said by someone famous is still wrong, and truth spoken by a nobody is still truth. Of course reality is a bit further from this ideal. But outright admitting it would be hard.
It's a bit like the "in America, anyone can become president!".
logicchains 16 hours ago [-]
>But outright admitting it would be hard.
"Science progresses one funeral at a time" - Max Planck.
kragen 22 hours ago [-]
The funny thing is that you'd think that arXiv would suffer from the same problems because journals and conferences exist.
bonoboTP 22 hours ago [-]
People who submit to and review for conferences have known for quite some time how random that process is. Also they are slow. In a field that advances leaps and bounds on a monthly time scale, holding a conference half a year later or publishing a journal article more than a year later is just equal to irrelevance. The reason conferences still matter is because of legacy systems that are slow to adapt to the new reality (and because of networking opportunities).
But actually, thinking back, 10 years ago there may have been more of a stigma around a paper that was only on arxiv.
jltsiren 21 hours ago [-]
If your result is not worth publishing in a journal a year or two from now, it't not worth submitting to arXiv today. Just write a blog post about it and move on. And maybe write a paper once you have discovered something of more lasting value.
joshjob42 2 hours ago [-]
What makes publishing it valuable? At best it's a second round of PR for the paper, after it was initially released on the arXiv. Reviewers sometimes have good suggestions, but you can get suggestions from people on your arXiv paper and post a v2.
From the perspective of advancing science, journals seem mostly pointless and most of their benefit could be had at next to no cost if we just agreed to publish on the arXiv and pair it with a review system.
From the perspective of advancing scientific careers, because of how founders and institutions treat arXiv papers, you have to still publish in a journal, and so people keep publishing in journals.
But like, at least in physics time passes at the speed of arXiv posts, and getting published usually happens after it's been cited many times already. And if people are already incorporating it into the web of knowledge/responding to it etc., then what did the journal do?
jltsiren 43 minutes ago [-]
In my experience (in CS, bioinformatics, and genomics), the first round of reviews often improves the paper substantially. You are getting feedback from people outside your usual peer group, and they tend to notice things people closer to you don't.
And writing is thinking. Because you are forced to iterate on the text over a long period of time, your understanding of the topic improves and you learn to express the ideas better. Your job as a scientist is creating new knowledge, and the initial publication of new results is only the first step towards that.
bonoboTP 21 hours ago [-]
It's worth publishing somewhere because PhD students need to graduate. And there are many PhD students because it's a ticket to industry labs. And because many professorships around popular topics were created. Those people need to graduate, so there have to be papers. Blog posts don't let you graduate. A good arxiv paper that just got rejected for unfair reasons, but otherwise gets a good community reception can still count towards your graduation if you have a sensible advisor.
Not sure if you understand how the sausage gets made. People won't spend effort at scale (there are always exceptions) on stuff that's not incentivized, such as blog posts. If you work on something, the goal is to make it count. But if you fail on that, arXiv is a second best option.
Also, papers that get published at conferences also get out of date pretty fast anyway. That's just how fast moving fields work.
But things may end up moving the way you are saying, as long as incentives keep up.
Journals (1-2 years) -> conferences (6 months) -> arxiv (weeks to write once the work is done, then days to publish) -> next thing (immediate AI writeup, code, results, tests, open scripts, weights, full reproducibility, full access allowed for other AIs to scrape and learn from, and reorganize and recombine on a speed of days or hours from result to adoption)
jltsiren 20 hours ago [-]
It's not been my experience that papers published in CS conferences get outdated quickly. Maybe AI/ML is different, but it's a weird edge case that should not dominate the discussion. Even CS as a whole is an outlier, because most fields that use arXiv don't have conference papers. If the expectations of AI/ML or even the wider CS are too different, maybe they could start a preprint repository of their own.
One of weird aspects of CS research is the tendency to publish small papers. In more experimental fields, a paper may represent years of work for the first author. But CS students often finish multiple projects every year. Maybe it's because of the focus on conferences. You want to attend conferences (to build your networks, and because it's interesting and valuable), but you often don't get reimbursed if you don't have anything to present. Students from other fields can just present their work in progress, but CS students have to come up with publishable results.
Maybe CS should also strive towards bigger projects. Instead of publishing individual results (which someone often improves a year or two later), the papers could focus on the outcomes of entire research directions. That way you are more likely to produce something of lasting value. Something that is worth writing up and rewriting and polishing, until you understand the ideas much better than after the initial write-up.
bonoboTP 15 hours ago [-]
> Maybe AI/ML is different, but it's a weird edge case that should not dominate the discussion
I wonder about the recent proportions. Growth in ML papers has been mind boggling and I wouldn't be surprised if a major part of Arxiv's submission spike was in AI ML topics.
> Maybe CS should also strive towards bigger projects.
The current rule of thumb is that you need at least three accepted papers in good venues to graduate with a PhD. Until that changes, the incentives point towards trying to publish often. And PIs want this because they also get evaluated in this publish or perish system. This is my main point. Throttling is a stopgap solution because academia doesn't want to admit its internal problems that have been boiling over already before AI.
bonoboTP 22 hours ago [-]
This is always the fate of explicitly "alternative" platforms, because only those people go there who are pushed out of the mainstream, who will tend to have some serious deficiencies, otherwise they'd try to be on the mainstream platform. Same with unmoderated social media turning into far-right places. Once a place obtains this type of reputation, it will be even more repellent for anyone not like that who wants to make it clear they are not like that, leading to a cascade, where the thing becomes a hermetically isolated "radioactive" place.
By the same principle, someone in the early 2000s could reasonably say "only weirdos date online", but the mainstream can shift also.
22 hours ago [-]
contubernio 19 hours ago [-]
Arxiv is the principal forum for publishing mathematics research of quality. Journals serve a purely archival and bureaucratic purpose; almost no value is added by the refereeing process (probably more is lost) and journal publishing neither improves accessibility nor diffusion of results.
black_knight 15 hours ago [-]
I agree fully that Arxiv is the principle publishing platform for mathematics. However, I have almost always gotten good value out of journal peer-review. It might just be that my sub-field is tightly knit, but I always receive thorough reviews with mostly good questions and suggestions for improvement. And I try to give the same when I do reviews of my own.
Even critical remarks are in the spirit of "You should do this better!", never the kind of gate-keeping bullshit I have seen in other fields.
bee_rider 23 hours ago [-]
Agree that it basically shouldn’t be necessary. But unfortunately Arxiv isn’t able to change the bad incentive structure that the broader hiring ecosystem has set up, right?
bonoboTP 22 hours ago [-]
If academics and their committees actually deeply considered the scientific qualities of applicants, gaming the numbers would not matter. So I just find it hard to blame AI slop instead of the broken process that academia has settled on.
Part of the reason that the value of Arxiv papers has gone up, is that it's pretty well known that the conference review system is already quite broken and random and lazy and superficial. So being rejected from there is not a good reason to ignore a paper, so conference-rejected Arxiv-only but good papers are a regular occurrence. If conference review had better signal, arxiv could have zero signal.
The other issue is the time delay. Conferences have stopped being an actual place to learn about new work, the way it had been 10+ years ago. Now it's all outdated stuff, and as a specialist you already know the important papers months before the actual conference, so the conference is a networking event basically. The real exchange of ideas moved to Arxiv and Github and social media, with its own problems, hype, algorithmic engagement optimization incentives etc.
But the pressure that shifted away from conferences to arxiv is continuing. The old guard was pearl clutching already by the erosion of conference rubber stamps as this big prestige. The newer ones are now trying to hold back the tide at the Arxiv line. But it will keep on moving faster and faster. And what is going to matter in the end is not how things used to be, but what delivers actual value. If the slop is slop, it will dwindle. If it starts to be actually good, all this will just turn into basically a dock-unions-opposing-automation story.
paulpauper 20 hours ago [-]
Moderation for Arxiv is a silly idea. It already shouldn't be taken as a quality signal that something is able to be up on Arxiv. Obviously they should remove illegal stuff, but beyond that, requiring moderation is a misunderstanding of their role and reason for popularity.
Arxiv papers are regularly cited and assumed to be suitable for peer review. So some standards need to be maintained . it's not a free for all.
bonoboTP 20 hours ago [-]
How about reading before citing? The bar was already very low for getting into Arxiv. If you used that as a quick decider of whether the work is good and should be trusted, you were already doing it wrong.
astrolx 14 hours ago [-]
I think it is a sensible idea, as a matter of fact, I think journals should do it too, maybe even more strict. Because the hike in submission means more burden for the peer-reviewers -- and this work is done (so far) for free.
randomizedalgs 9 hours ago [-]
In theoretical computer science, at least, researchers plan their work to finish on three major deadlines a year (SODA, STOC, FOCS). STOC [1] is requiring all submissions to be uploaded to ArXiv before submission, and allows up to 5 submissions per author. I wonder if they'll change their policy or instead adopt an additional de-facto limit of two per submitter.
In my experience, ArXiv has become too slow to publish. My previous paper took weeks to be approved. It was a recommended path for journal submission (posting to a public repository and submitting a link), and after waiting a long time, I just posted it on hal.science instead, and it was up in a day.
Another one of mine has been on hold for 18 days and counting.
I think it is a great service to the community, but clearly they are having a scalability problem.
mcherm 14 hours ago [-]
Have you contributed volunteer moderator time? Ultimately, that is the most important resource being strained on ArXiv by large numbers of submissions.
Oscalemor 13 hours ago [-]
Ah thats nice, been looking for alternatives, thank you!
sasaf5 14 hours ago [-]
LLMs have introduced a new form of polution: cognitive polution.
9 hours ago [-]
mox-1 12 hours ago [-]
Seems that they are accepting papers at similarly high rates.
If https://weekinpapers.com is anything to go by, the number of _accepted_ submissions is now over 4000 per week.
Oscalemor 13 hours ago [-]
Since the joint truth of society now gathers on ArXiv it's interesting to see how we can revamp the efforts, since many of us are gathering up opposing views, setups and research gathered some other alternatives here in the comment section to check out!
Nice writeup and the policy is a step in the right direction. I suspect simple rate-limit measures like this will be a big improvement.
I suspect a logical conclusion Arxiv and elsewhere may be an identity management system with an aggressive filter, and shared blacklists. I suspect that classifying people as spam/slop-submitters, then banning them (or whatever identity they used; name, email, name + organization etc), applying incremental rate limits over the general one, may be required.
iterance 23 hours ago [-]
If the queue size grows beyond volunteer capacity then volunteer time becomes a scarce resource. In my experience (in other organizations), more likely than out and out block listing is aggressive prioritization. It takes sensible design to determine which papers get to consume moderators' time first.
Then, if someone posts rejected papers regularly and is deprioritized, it naturally follows that they may try to submit three more... and get stuck naturally. There is no need to ban them. They will still get a response, and they will get a fair shake - when there is time.
pfdietz 10 hours ago [-]
Incoming: lots of new people paid to be submitters.
I wonder what funding agencies are going to say about this.
Grimeton 9 hours ago [-]
> With AI tools becoming more advanced and accessible to authors, the “practical limit” of how many papers can be submitted is now up for debate.
No it's not. Research doesn't just get done because AI.
This is the literal shitflooding (excusez moi) of science with hundreds of papers a day that will take years to be verified/rejected by humans.
It will kill science.
jsrozner 14 hours ago [-]
They wrote "we are seeing a massive transformation in how researchers communicate their results," but they meant "how slop generators submit their slop".
The world will continue to be overwhelmed by people using AI to produce garbage. AI unlocks a treasure trove of new resources to be exploited. This is true even if AI can sometimes be useful.
lhk931122 22 hours ago [-]
There may be great researchers who work on several papers in a month, but even with this rule they can just split them and submit to arxiv, so I think it is very reasonable. AI slop is everywhere now (and also increasing), and I think this fast and forceful action by arxiv is effective at stopping this wave of slop.
paulpauper 20 hours ago [-]
publish everything on zenodo for timestamp/priority and then slowly integrate to arxiv
move6729 1 days ago [-]
This will just force high SNR Posters to other platforms. ArXiv is rate limiting itself out of relevance.
anvuong 1 days ago [-]
Any example of high SNR authors who consistently putting more than 2 papers months after months after months for this to be a problem?
AlotOfReading 1 days ago [-]
It doesn't seem humanly possible to produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month. If you have a larger batch of related papers, it's easy to spread submissions over multiple months. You should probably be doing that anyway, because comments on one paper may affect the others.
NotOscarWilde 1 days ago [-]
> It doesn't seem humanly possible to produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month.
The situation right now is pretty crazy, for example this established TCS professor [1] has at least 4 arXiv submissions co-authored by him in September [2]. This includes the recent breakthrough on the matroid secretary problem, which has a pretty interesting AI story of its own, if you haven't seen it yet [3].
Of course prolific professors can work around this by working with younger researchers who upload the work, but this just makes the rate limit a solo author bottleneck, which feels a bit weird.
[3]: Concurrent Discovery Disclosure: The proof of the main result in this manuscript was obtained in a conversation with ChatGPT-6 Astra on Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 1:02 AM PDT. We then prepared this manuscript for public release, with the intent of uploading it on the morning of Thursday, September 17, 2026. In the early morning hours of September 17, while finalizing the submission, we discovered the manuscript of Abdi, Banihashem, Hajiaghayi, and Mittal, uploaded on September 16, 2026, which contains the same result via an essentially identical approach. We are sharing our manuscript nonetheless in case our exposition is of independent utility to the community, and we hope this experience stimulates broader discussion about concurrent discovery in the AI era. (From https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20797 .)
AlotOfReading 1 days ago [-]
I don't see what we lose if lead authors are forced to submit work themselves instead of going through the PI's account.
But yes, it'd be nice if arxiv also rate-limited co-author submissions with some higher number to discourage the most flagrant PI co-authorship abuses.
jltsiren 24 hours ago [-]
The situation is pretty crazy, but it just means the bar for publishable results will go up. Theoretical computer science is a field built around conferences. The number of papers that can be published in reputable conferences ultimately depends on the size of the community and the willingness and ability of its members to attend those conferences.
Gregaros 1 days ago [-]
Insane. No. Mathematicians will not produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month as their rate calculated over any reasonable time scale; but their maximum per month? Very much the case that they will complete linked papers/dependencies/series of work/etc, spend a month in editing across multiple nearly-complete submissions, and so on.
And in mathematics, at least, priority on results is determined by the first time it appears out in the wild; for most, this is the arXiv.
Nobody is going to accept waiting a month on something that they fear may be scooped, costing them years of work and thought.
This affectively makes the arXiv obsolete for much of the purpose it has heretofore been put to.
AlotOfReading 24 hours ago [-]
Arxiv has had a limit of 3 simultaneous submissions for a couple years now. This is only adding per-month limits.
miki123211 22 hours ago [-]
I find it interesting that we, in the AI community, usually say "Arxiv", where mathematicians seem to say "the Arxiv".
Whereas I would say "Have they put this on Arxiv yet?", mathematicians would say "Have they put this on the Arxiv yet?".
hingler36 1 days ago [-]
Do you have a concrete example of a high SNR researcher who will be limited by this policy? Aka one who is submitting more than two high quality papers per month?
sarjann 1 days ago [-]
I imagine they could augment it with giving higher rates for some people based on things like h-index.
black_knight 10 hours ago [-]
Something really rubs me the wrong way about automatically limiting people in science based on a number attached to their name. Seems like a very slippery slope!
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
It's pushing slop elsewhere.
Rendered at 22:35:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I hope something like this could also be adopted for some of our larger conferences - the absolute limits on co-authorship are what seem to cause the most grumbles.
I would think arXiv can work something out for these cases.
Not for any neutrino experiment I know of. There are paper committees that govern publication but the actual preprint submission to arXiv is always done by one of the authors.
> I would think arXiv can work something out for these cases.
Yes, I also expect special cases would be defined.
Internet forums when internet access was only available to college students vs Internet forums today (called Eternal September, September being the month when new Freshman got access to the internet, Eternal September being when everyone in the developed world did)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13187
arXiv should ban these submitters.
> In September of 2016, arXiv received 9,869 submissions. In September of 2024, arXiv received 20,569 submissions. This September, arXiv received 40,363 submissions, which in turn generated almost 9,000 support tickets for arXiv staff and moderators.
> arXiv now limits submitters to up to two submissions per calendar month, with a limit of three total active submissions at any given time.
The hosting cost side I can understand, though they received quite some funding recently, but I assume it's not going towards actually running the site, but to who knows what broader impacts and so on.
Moderation for Arxiv is a silly idea. It already shouldn't be taken as a quality signal that something is able to be up on Arxiv. Obviously they should remove illegal stuff, but beyond that, requiring moderation is a misunderstanding of their role and reason for popularity.
If hosting is too expensive, I guess an alternative aggregator could also arise. With just metadata and a hash of the pdf that can be hosted anywhere, and as the sumbitter, if you move the file, you can change the URL.
The main reason for Arxiv's existence is the timestamping and the easy referencing. (Though I admit that the stable hosting is also a pretty important part, but they mention moderation effort as the reason, not the hosting costs.)
Academia is losing sight of the forest for the trees, can't see more than an arm's length ahead of their noses.
It sounds like you're advocating for arXiv to become viXra. On https://vixra.org/all/2610 the second paper is currently "Correct Interpretation of the Great Discoveries in Particle Physics: I. Reconsidering the Higgs Boson via Vedic Vortex Structure", followed by a paper arguing that classical electrodynamics is bogus, "Gauss’s Flux Theorem Does not Hold in Time-Varying Electric Fields", and then "On the Boundary Problem in the Origins of Matter, Life, and Consciousness".
I don't think arXiv will continue to receive "quite some funding" if this is what it contains.
If Arxiv was the only game in town and it allowed everything, the result would be more like GitHub or Substack. That is, you wouldn't be able to trust everything hosted there, and a lot of it would be low-quality promotional garbage, with filtering moved to a different layer.
You could do some kind of karma system for example, where the prestige of your institution, your own karma, number of citations, papers published in high impact-factor journals etc would affect karma weight. You could have journals be like "awesome-x" lists on Github, with authors who have already been published there able to endorse other papers. I believe the mathematics community is trying that.
The story that academia likes to tell itself about itself is that it is skeptical and iconclastic and objectively evaluates each piece of science on its own virtues and it doesn't matter who says it. A wrong thing said by someone famous is still wrong, and truth spoken by a nobody is still truth. Of course reality is a bit further from this ideal. But outright admitting it would be hard.
It's a bit like the "in America, anyone can become president!".
"Science progresses one funeral at a time" - Max Planck.
But actually, thinking back, 10 years ago there may have been more of a stigma around a paper that was only on arxiv.
From the perspective of advancing science, journals seem mostly pointless and most of their benefit could be had at next to no cost if we just agreed to publish on the arXiv and pair it with a review system.
From the perspective of advancing scientific careers, because of how founders and institutions treat arXiv papers, you have to still publish in a journal, and so people keep publishing in journals.
But like, at least in physics time passes at the speed of arXiv posts, and getting published usually happens after it's been cited many times already. And if people are already incorporating it into the web of knowledge/responding to it etc., then what did the journal do?
And writing is thinking. Because you are forced to iterate on the text over a long period of time, your understanding of the topic improves and you learn to express the ideas better. Your job as a scientist is creating new knowledge, and the initial publication of new results is only the first step towards that.
Not sure if you understand how the sausage gets made. People won't spend effort at scale (there are always exceptions) on stuff that's not incentivized, such as blog posts. If you work on something, the goal is to make it count. But if you fail on that, arXiv is a second best option.
Also, papers that get published at conferences also get out of date pretty fast anyway. That's just how fast moving fields work.
But things may end up moving the way you are saying, as long as incentives keep up.
Journals (1-2 years) -> conferences (6 months) -> arxiv (weeks to write once the work is done, then days to publish) -> next thing (immediate AI writeup, code, results, tests, open scripts, weights, full reproducibility, full access allowed for other AIs to scrape and learn from, and reorganize and recombine on a speed of days or hours from result to adoption)
One of weird aspects of CS research is the tendency to publish small papers. In more experimental fields, a paper may represent years of work for the first author. But CS students often finish multiple projects every year. Maybe it's because of the focus on conferences. You want to attend conferences (to build your networks, and because it's interesting and valuable), but you often don't get reimbursed if you don't have anything to present. Students from other fields can just present their work in progress, but CS students have to come up with publishable results.
Maybe CS should also strive towards bigger projects. Instead of publishing individual results (which someone often improves a year or two later), the papers could focus on the outcomes of entire research directions. That way you are more likely to produce something of lasting value. Something that is worth writing up and rewriting and polishing, until you understand the ideas much better than after the initial write-up.
I wonder about the recent proportions. Growth in ML papers has been mind boggling and I wouldn't be surprised if a major part of Arxiv's submission spike was in AI ML topics.
> Maybe CS should also strive towards bigger projects.
The current rule of thumb is that you need at least three accepted papers in good venues to graduate with a PhD. Until that changes, the incentives point towards trying to publish often. And PIs want this because they also get evaluated in this publish or perish system. This is my main point. Throttling is a stopgap solution because academia doesn't want to admit its internal problems that have been boiling over already before AI.
By the same principle, someone in the early 2000s could reasonably say "only weirdos date online", but the mainstream can shift also.
Even critical remarks are in the spirit of "You should do this better!", never the kind of gate-keeping bullshit I have seen in other fields.
Part of the reason that the value of Arxiv papers has gone up, is that it's pretty well known that the conference review system is already quite broken and random and lazy and superficial. So being rejected from there is not a good reason to ignore a paper, so conference-rejected Arxiv-only but good papers are a regular occurrence. If conference review had better signal, arxiv could have zero signal.
The other issue is the time delay. Conferences have stopped being an actual place to learn about new work, the way it had been 10+ years ago. Now it's all outdated stuff, and as a specialist you already know the important papers months before the actual conference, so the conference is a networking event basically. The real exchange of ideas moved to Arxiv and Github and social media, with its own problems, hype, algorithmic engagement optimization incentives etc.
But the pressure that shifted away from conferences to arxiv is continuing. The old guard was pearl clutching already by the erosion of conference rubber stamps as this big prestige. The newer ones are now trying to hold back the tide at the Arxiv line. But it will keep on moving faster and faster. And what is going to matter in the end is not how things used to be, but what delivers actual value. If the slop is slop, it will dwindle. If it starts to be actually good, all this will just turn into basically a dock-unions-opposing-automation story.
Arxiv papers are regularly cited and assumed to be suitable for peer review. So some standards need to be maintained . it's not a free for all.
[1] STOC 2027 Call for Papers https://acm-stoc.org/stoc2027/stoc2027-cfp.html
Another one of mine has been on hold for 18 days and counting.
I think it is a great service to the community, but clearly they are having a scalability problem.
If https://weekinpapers.com is anything to go by, the number of _accepted_ submissions is now over 4000 per week.
I suspect a logical conclusion Arxiv and elsewhere may be an identity management system with an aggressive filter, and shared blacklists. I suspect that classifying people as spam/slop-submitters, then banning them (or whatever identity they used; name, email, name + organization etc), applying incremental rate limits over the general one, may be required.
Then, if someone posts rejected papers regularly and is deprioritized, it naturally follows that they may try to submit three more... and get stuck naturally. There is no need to ban them. They will still get a response, and they will get a fair shake - when there is time.
I wonder what funding agencies are going to say about this.
No it's not. Research doesn't just get done because AI.
This is the literal shitflooding (excusez moi) of science with hundreds of papers a day that will take years to be verified/rejected by humans.
It will kill science.
The world will continue to be overwhelmed by people using AI to produce garbage. AI unlocks a treasure trove of new resources to be exploited. This is true even if AI can sometimes be useful.
The situation right now is pretty crazy, for example this established TCS professor [1] has at least 4 arXiv submissions co-authored by him in September [2]. This includes the recent breakthrough on the matroid secretary problem, which has a pretty interesting AI story of its own, if you haven't seen it yet [3].
Of course prolific professors can work around this by working with younger researchers who upload the work, but this just makes the rate limit a solo author bottleneck, which feels a bit weird.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Hajiaghayi
[2]: https://arxiv.org/search/cs?query=Hajiaghayi&searchtype=auth...
[3]: Concurrent Discovery Disclosure: The proof of the main result in this manuscript was obtained in a conversation with ChatGPT-6 Astra on Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 1:02 AM PDT. We then prepared this manuscript for public release, with the intent of uploading it on the morning of Thursday, September 17, 2026. In the early morning hours of September 17, while finalizing the submission, we discovered the manuscript of Abdi, Banihashem, Hajiaghayi, and Mittal, uploaded on September 16, 2026, which contains the same result via an essentially identical approach. We are sharing our manuscript nonetheless in case our exposition is of independent utility to the community, and we hope this experience stimulates broader discussion about concurrent discovery in the AI era. (From https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20797 .)
But yes, it'd be nice if arxiv also rate-limited co-author submissions with some higher number to discourage the most flagrant PI co-authorship abuses.
And in mathematics, at least, priority on results is determined by the first time it appears out in the wild; for most, this is the arXiv.
Nobody is going to accept waiting a month on something that they fear may be scooped, costing them years of work and thought.
This affectively makes the arXiv obsolete for much of the purpose it has heretofore been put to.
Whereas I would say "Have they put this on Arxiv yet?", mathematicians would say "Have they put this on the Arxiv yet?".