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ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
- adamnemecek 7mo agoGood call, ArXiv seems like one of the most important institutions out there right now.
- p-e-w 7mo agoIt’s so important, in fact, that there should be more than one such institution. People keep falling into the same trap. They love monopolies, then are shocked when those monopolies jerk them around.
- andbberger 7mo agothere is. bioarxiv.
- auggierose 7mo agoI am using Zenodo for a while now instead. It is more user friendly, as well.
- mastermage 7mo agoZenodo is more for IT Papers and also datasets isn't it?
- auggierose 7mo agoIt can host large datasets as well, yes. It is hosted by CERN, so it is not specifically IT in any way. It also allows you to restrict access to the files of your submission. It has no requirements to submit your LaTeX sources, any PDF will be fine. There are also no restrictions on who can publish. You'll get a DOI, of course. Everything published on arXiv could also be published on Zenodo, but not the other way around.
- mastermage 7mo agooh interesting I didnt know this
- jruohonen 7mo agoZenodo is great too, yes, but their meta-data management is somewhat problematic; i.e., it can be changed at whim, which makes indexing difficult.
- Al-Khwarizmi 7mo agoI like it as well, it works great. But I wonder if it would scale if at some point there were a massive exodus from arXiv.
- auggierose 7mo agoI think it already hosts much more data than arXiv, given that they also host large datasets.
- freehorse 7mo agoIt is just a preprint repository. It is pretty open (the stories where a preprint was rejected or delayed unreasonably are extremely rare). It offers the basic services for a math/compsci/physics themed preprint repository. I don't see much of a monopoly, nor any "moat" apart from it being recognised. You can already post preprints on a personal website or on github, and there are "alternatives" such as researchgate that can also host preprints, or zenodo. There are also some lesser known alternatives even. I do not see anything special in hosting preprints online apart from the convenience of being able to have a centralised place to place them and search for them (which you call "monopoly"). If anything, the recognisability and centrality of arxiv helped a lot the old, darker days to establish open access to papers. There was a time when many journals would not let you publish a preprint, or have all kinds of weird rules when you can and when you can't. Probably still to some degree.
- koakuma-chan 7mo agoit just hosts pdfs, no?
- IshKebab 7mo agoTechnically yes, socially no.
- aragilar 7mo agoIt does do a fair amount of filtering of submissions, and it's a long term archive (e.g. for the next 100+ years). I suspect both (but with the former dominating) are the issue.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoJust put out a torrent and people of the sort at r/DataHoarder will keep it alive for longer than bureaucrats.
- pfortuny 7mo agoAlso the sources and has a very tame but useful pre-acceptance process.
- freehorse 7mo agoWell, technically, it can also compile your tex file if you upload the tex file instead of the pdf directly, which helps a lot in standardizing the stylistic structure between preprints. Most other repositories are wild west and inconsistent. I really appreciate the similarity in style applied to most preprints there. Moreover, this means you can also download not just the pdf, but the source tex file to, which can be very useful.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoThe similarity in style comes from conference and journal templates, not from Arxiv. You can style your paper with latex in any style, Arxiv doesn't care. On Arxiv you mostly see preprints that people submit to conferences and journals and they enforce the style.
- kergonath 7mo agoThe French government put a bit of money on the table to help researchers fulfil their open science requirements for government and EU grants, and funded the HAL repository ( https://hal.science/ https://hal.science/ ). It’s much smaller than arXiv, but it exists. In other countries like the UK there are clusters of smaller repositories as well, but it’s not as well centralised.
- dataflow 7mo agoThis sounds terrible. Of course there's a huge risk of it becoming made for-profit. It almost makes you wonder if the academic publishers are behind this push somehow. Could they not have made it into some legal structure that puts universities at the top? Say, with a bunch of universities owning shares that comprise the entirety of the ownership of arXiv, but that would allow arXiv to independently raise funds?
- gucci-on-fleek 7mo ago> Of course there's a huge risk of it becoming made for-profit. The article says that "it will become an independent nonprofit corporation", and as OpenAI's failed attempt showed, converting a non-profit to a for-profit organization is either really hard or impossible. > Could they not have made it into some legal structure that puts universities at the top? As a corporation (even a non-profit one), it will have a board of directors. I have no idea what their charter will look like, but I would be surprised if at least one seat wasn't reserved for a university representative, and more than that seems quite likely as well.
- MostlyStable 7mo agoOpenAI didn't get everything that they wanted, but I very much disagree with calling it a "failed attempt". The non-profit went from owning the entirety of OpenAI to having ~25% stake.
- gucci-on-fleek 7mo agoAh, thanks for the correction.
- ronsor 7mo agoSam Altman is a special kind of person; not many could pull off the schemes he does.
- gentleman11 7mo ago
- halperter 7mo agoStatement by arXiv: https://tech.cornell.edu/arxiv/ https://tech.cornell.edu/arxiv/
- reed1234 7mo agoShould be the main link. The original article is based on the CEO job posting.
- tornikeo 7mo agoNow the question is, will arxiv wage a decade long bloody war with Cornell, using heavy infantry (PhD students), archers (reviewers) and field artillery (AI slop papers), or will the independence be mostly peaceful? Only time can tell.
- unit149 7mo ago[dead]
- psalminen 7mo agoI might be missing something, but I still don't get the why. I don't see any "problem" that needs to be solved.
- kolinko 7mo agoThe article lists the reasons quite clearly.
- binsquare 7mo agoFor everyone else, The reason is because arxiv is growing significantly leading to 297,000 deficit in operating costs for 2025 alone. Corenell has helped with donation a long with other organizations that pay membership fees. As a result, donors + leaders of arxiv think it's best to spin off to increase funding.
- vl 7mo agoWhat is unclear why they need stuff of 27 and 6.7 million to operate essentially static hosting website in 2026.
- swiftcoder 7mo agoThe "essentially static hosting" isn't the cost centre (although with 5 million MAU, it's nothing to sneeze at). The real costs are on the input side - they have an ingestion pipeline that ensures standardised paper formatting and so on, plus at least some degree of human review.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoDo you mean that the CPU compute cost of turning latex into pdf/HTML is the main cost?
- swiftcoder 7mo ago
- tgtracing 7mo ago[dead]
- davnicwil 7mo agoVery unrelated to the article, but I think 'arXiv' as a brand is bad, and really detrimental to what the institution aims to accomplish. That is, it's not readily parseable, it really gives an insider term vibe - like this isn't for you if you don't already know what it means or how you should read or say it. It sort of reminds me of the overuse of latin and latinate terms generally in the old professions and, well, the academy. Just always struck me as being somewhat at odds with the goal.
- john-titor 7mo agoI wonder what makes you feel that. I've been publishing preprints close to a decade on arxiv now and never had any particular feelings about it. To me it's just a way to get out your work fast, so that there is already a trace of it on the Internets - nothing more and nothing less. > That is, it's not readily parseable, it really gives an insider term vibe... Isn't that normal with highly specialized research fields? I agree many papers could benefit from clearer wording, but working in a niche means you sometimes don't reach a broader audience
- davnicwil 7mo agoIt's an opinion, and you feeling no particular way about it is equally valid. But I did justify and maybe to reword slightly, surely if one of the main drivers is opening up research, the brand name should be something that's less obscure and more accessible / understandable as to what it is on first sight? Maybe arXiv evoking the word 'archive' with an ancient Greek twist does that for some, but it's clearly a bit cryptic for many, and if the point is to open up probably the brand should just be something much plainer.
- OutOfHere 7mo agoWith 300K for the CEO, its enshittification will commence imminently. It will now serve to maximize revenue. Just wait and watch while they issue a premium membership, payment requirements for authors, and other revenue generators to please their investors.
- exe34 7mo agothey'll just turn into a shitty journal at this point, they just need to introduce peer review and they can start competing with the real journals on price point. another will need to rise to take its place.
- OutOfHere 7mo ago> they'll just turn into a shitty journal at this point To this end, they added an endorsement requirement this year: https://blog.arxiv.org/2026/01/21/attention-authors-updated-endorsement-policy/ https://blog.arxiv.org/2026/01/21/attention-authors-updated-...
- Peteragain 7mo ago.. and soon to be dependent on US military funding? Controlled by someone who has run-ins with universities? This'll end in tears.
- Garlef 7mo agoMaybe they should implement a graph based trust system: You need your favourite academic gatekeeper (= thesis advisor) to vouch for you in order to be allowed to upload. Then AI slop gets flagged and the shame spreads through the graph. And flaggings need to have evidence attached that can again be flagged.
- dmos62 7mo agoI've often thought that similar trust systems would work well in social media, web search, etc., but I've never seen it implemented in a meaningful way. I wonder what I'm missing.
- IshKebab 7mo agoLobsters has this I think. But it also means I've never posted there.
- pred_ 7mo agoThe endorsement system already works along that line: https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html It's probably not perfect but in practice, it seems to have been enough to get rid of the worst crackpotty spam.
- ryangibb 7mo agoYou mean like endorsement? https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html
- justinnk 7mo agoThey already had a basic form of this for a while [1] > arXiv requires that users be endorsed before submitting their first paper to arXiv or a new category. [1] https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
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- frankling_ 7mo agoThe recent announcement to reject review articles and position papers already smelled like a shift towards a more "opinionated" stance, and this move smells worse. The vacuum that arXiv originally filled was one of a glorified PDF hosting service with just enough of a reputation to allow some preprints to be cited in a formally published paper, and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos. It has also been instrumental in pushing publishers towards open access (i.e., to finally give up). Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, particularly in ML, with some decently cited papers never formally published and "preprints" being cited left and right. Consider the impression you get when seeing a reference to an arXiv preprint vs. a link to an author's institutional website. In my view, arXiv fulfills its function better the less power it has as an institution, and I thus have exactly zero trust that the split from Cornell is driven by that function. We've seen the kind of appeasement prose from their statement and FAQ [1] countless times before, and it's now time for the usual routine of snapshotting the site to watch the inevitable amendments to the mission statement. "What positive changes should users expect to see?" - I guess the negative ones we'll have to see for ourselves. [1] https://tech.cornell.edu/arxiv/ https://tech.cornell.edu/arxiv/
- hijodelsol 7mo agoI came here to say something similar. As someone who works in a field that applies machine learning but is not purely focused on it, I interact with people who think that arXiv is the only relevant platform and that they don't need to submit their work to any journal, as well as people who still think that preprints don't count at all and that data isn't published until it's printed in an academic journal. It can feel like a clash of worlds. I think both sides could learn from the other. In the case of ML, I understand the desire to move fast and that average time to publication of 250-300 days in some of the top-tier journals can feel like an unnecessary burden. But having been on both sides of peer review, there is value to the system and it has made for better work. Not doing any of it follows the same spirit as not benchmarking your approach against more than maybe one alternative and that already as an after-thought. Or benchmaxxing but not exploring the actual real-world consequences, time and cost trade offs, etc. Now, is academic publishing perfect? Of course not, very very far from it. It desperately needs to be reformed to keep it economically accessible, time efficient for both authors, editors and peer reviewers and to prevent the "hot topic of the day" from dominating journals and making sure that peer review aligns with the needs of the community and actually improves the quality of the work, rather than having "malicious peer review" to get some citations or pet peeves in. Given the power that the ML field holds and the interesting experiments with open review, I would wish for the field to engage more with the scientific system at large and perhaps try to drive reforms and improve it, rather than completely abandoning it and treating a PDF hosting service as a journal (ofc, preprints would still be desirable and are important, but they can not carry the entire field alone).
- asimpleusecase 7mo agoI wonder if there are plans to licence the content for AI training
- KellyCriterion 7mo agoId guess OAI & co have already copied without asking?
- mkl 7mo agoNo need to ask - the whole point is open access. https://info.arxiv.org/help/bulk_data.html https://info.arxiv.org/help/bulk_data.html
- mkl 7mo agoIt's been available all along: https://info.arxiv.org/help/bulk_data.html https://info.arxiv.org/help/bulk_data.html
- bobokaytop 7mo ago[dead]
- shevy-java 7mo ago"Recently arXiv’s growth has accelerated. Since 2022, it has expanded its staff to 27, in large part to deal with a 50% increase in submitted manuscripts." I am wary of that. IMO the business model is damaged therein. You can say in 2022 we had 27; bankrupt in 2030.
- Aerolfos 7mo agoAnd they hired a LinkedIn business idiot to run the new organization - so the aim is for an infinite growth tech startup in terms of governance, despite the technical legal status of non-profit. It shows in the language they use in the announcement, too ("improved financial viability in the long run") OpenAI shows exactly how well that works and what that kind of governance does to a company and to its support of science and the commons. TL;DR, it's fucked.
- Ghengeaua 7mo ago[dead]
- swiftcoder 7mo ago> raised concerns about the proposed $300,000 salary for arXiv’s new CEO, saying it seemed high Is a mid-to-high engineering salary outlandish for a CEO of what is likely to be a fairly major non-profit? Even non-profits have to be somewhat competitive when it comes to salary, and the ideal candidate is likely someone who would be balancing this against a tenured position at a major university
- mort96 7mo agoSalaries in the US are so bonkers. Everywhere else outside of the US, $300,000 is an outlandish high salary. To call it "mid to high" is insane.
- HappyPanacea 7mo agoYes the obvious play is to move human labor to cheaper countries like France (including CEO of course).
- renewiltord 7mo agoThe reason the French can’t build these things is the same reason they shouldn’t be allowed to be in charge. It’s a preprint PDF host. Just make your own if you can run this one.
- magnio 7mo agoThey do have their own: https://hal.science/ https://hal.science/ It is actually quite common to come across HAL in subfields of mathematics in my experience.
- bjourne 7mo agoHAL is decidedly second-tier. Given the option, everyone would pick arXiv over HAL. Hence, HAL hosts lots of stuff that didn't (even) make it to arXiv => lots of subpar dredge.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoI fear their Mozilla-ification and Wikipedia-ification. Scope creep, various outreach feel-good programs, ballooning costs, lost focus etc. And other types of enshittification. Any change to the basic premise will be a negative step. They should just be boring quiet unopininionated neutral background infrastructure.
- kergonath 7mo ago> They should just be quiet unopininionated neutral background infrastructure. Exactly. It should be a utility. Not quite dumb pipe, but not too far either.
- doctorwho42 7mo agoWe don't do 'utility' in America. Everything has S.V. brain rot - it's mixed with wall street brain rot, and now if you aren't extracting wealth out of what you have access to - you are failing.
- musicale 7mo agoI mean... someone needs to "unlock value" from ArXiv, right?
- Hendrikto 7mo ago> Mozilla-ification All the Mozilla executives have done for the last 15+ years is * lay off developers * spend lots of money on stupid side projects nobody asked for or wants * increase their own salaries and all that with the backdrop of falling quality, market share, and relevance. I would happily donate to Firefox, but this fucked up organization will never see a single cent from me. They will spend it on anything but Firefox, which is the only thing anybody wants them to spend it on. It might already be too late, and we will be left with a browser monopoly.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoAnd it is a risk for Arxiv too that once they start to drink the koolaid and start going to the same cocktail parties that these kinds of nonprofit board members and execs go to and will feel the need to prance around with some fancy stuff. "oh no, you see we are not a preprint server host anymore, our mission is a values driven blablabla to make a meaningful change in the blablabla, we have spent X dollars to promote the blablabla, take me seriously please I'm also fancy like you! "
- eastern-sun 7mo ago[dead]
- ACCount37 7mo agoFrankly, the only beef I have with arXiv as is: its insistence on blocking AI access. I had to tell my AI to set up an MCP for "fetch while bypassing arXiv's rate limit" so that it doesn't burn 40k tokens looking for workarounds every time it wants to look at a paper and gets hit with a "sorry, meatbags only" wall. Very annoying, given how relevant arXiv papers are for ML specifically, and how many of papers there are. Can't "human flesh search" through all of them to pick the relevant ones for your work, and they just had to insist on making it harder for AIs to do it too.
- spiralcoaster 7mo agoI hope they ramp up their blocking of AI access. The last thing we need is providers like this getting hammered by AI
- vedantxn 7mo agowe got this before gta 6
- contubernio 7mo agoWhat is worrisome about this development, and corollary actions like the hiring of a CEO with a $300,000/year salary, is that the essentially independent and community based platform will disappear. The ArXiv exists because mathematicians and physicists, and later computer scientists and engineers, posted there, freely, their work, with minimal attention to licensing and other commercial aspects. It has thrived because it required no peer review and made interesting things accessible quickly to whomever cared to read them. A setup as a US-based "non-profit" is worrisome, if only because 300K is an obscene salary even in a for-profit setting. That the US-based posters can't see this is evidence of the basic problem which is that the US, both left and right, has been taken over by a neoliberal feudal antidemocratic nativist mindset that is anathema to the sort of free interchange of ideas that underlay the ArXiv's development in the hands of mathematicians and physicists now swept aside and ignored by machine learning grifters and technicians who program computers.
- doctorwho42 7mo agoAs a US based academic, I have to say when I saw the salary I immediately gawked. I think it's not americans but silicon valley-ites and tech bros on here who have lived with inflated salary/net worth that think it's just a middle of the road salary. As I regularly interact with friends in engineering who make like $200k + benefits ($), and I wonder why I don't jump ship to that weird land.
- juped 7mo ago>Cornell, for example, had a limited capacity to pay software developers to maintain and upgrade the site, which still has a very no-frills look and feel. arXiv is doomed. It was nice while it lasted.
- oscaracso 7mo agoI am not a software engineer, although I do write programs. What is it about digital infrastructure that requires maintenance? In the natural world, there is corrosion, thermal fluctuation, radiation, seismic activity, vandalism, whathaveyou. What are the issues facing the arxiv demanding the attention of multiple people 'round the clock?
- bonoboTP 7mo agoThey have to update the software stack, replace usage of deprecated APIs, support new latex packages etc. They could probably minimize these by limiting the scope but just keeping a small, tightly scoped software functional is always boring, people want to work on fun new features, they enjoy the brand recognition and feel like they should do more stuff. I wonder when they will introduce the algorithmic feed and the social network features.
- stefantalpalaru 7mo ago[dead]
- taormina 7mo agoGiven that Cornell charges what, $50k a year as an Ivy League, $300k feels like almost nothing.
- losvedir 7mo agoarXiv is great. It's just a problem that there's so much slop. What if arXiv offered a subscription service that people in different fields could use to just see a curated selection of the top papers in their field each month. Established researchers in each field could then review some of the preprints for putting into the curated monthly list. Oh, wait.
- bonoboTP 7mo ago> see a curated selection of the top papers in their field https://www.scholar-inbox.com https://www.scholar-inbox.com
- hereme888 7mo agoFrom my limited experience, arXiv appears to include many low-quality, unreproducible papers, and some are straight-up self-marketing rather than serious scientific work.
- kingstnap 7mo agoIf you get some more experience you will find normal journals are exactly like that as well.
- whiplash451 7mo agoI'm not sure why we're so focused on filtering what gets into arxiv (which is an uphill battle and DOA at this point) vs fixing the indexing, i.e. the page rank of academia. Google "sorted out" a messy web with pagerank. Academic papers link to each others. What prevents us from building a ranking from there? I'm conscious I might be over-simplifying things, but curious to see what I am missing.
- tokai 7mo agoPage rank was inspired by bibliometrics and evaluation of science publications. It's messed up now because of the rankings. Further fiddling with ranking will not fix the problem.
- j2kun 7mo ago+1, PageRank was taken from academia. They even cited it in their original work. Funny how the origins of these things get forgotten.
- MengerSponge 6mo agoInspired by, not taken. It's a clever solution to a hard problem! Do you remember Ask Jeeves? Dogpile? Google was an incredible improvement!
- krick 7mo agoI am of the same opinion, and ultimately ArXiv becoming a journal that can prevent one from publishing a paper — no matter how junk it is — would pretty much kill its purpose. But I suppose that now when flooding the interned with LLM-generated garbage is almost endorsed by some satanic people, it is pretty much a security issue to have some sort of filter on uploads. Now, honestly, I have no idea why would one spend resources on uploading terabytes of LLM garbage to arXiv, but they sure can. Even if some crazy person is publishing like 2 nonsense papers daily, it is no harm and, if anything, valid data for psychology research. But if somebody actually floods it with non-human-generated content, well, I suppose it isn't even that expensive to make ArXiv totally unusable (and perhaps even unfeasible to host). So there has to be some filtering. But only to prevent the abuse. Otherwise, I indeed think that proper ranking, linking and user-driven moderation (again, not to prevent anybody from posting anything, but to label papers as more interesting for the specific community) is the only right way to go.
- hirako2000 7mo agoDo research papers published on Elsevier's sort of media remain more prestigious? I read a dozen papers a month, typically on arxiv, never from paywalled journals. I find the quality on par. But maybe I'm missing something.
- Fomite 7mo agoThis is very variable based on field. HN is heavily biased toward ArXiv-friendly fields.
- Drblessing 7mo agoArXiv is dead. Expect a paywall within three years, or other enshittification and slop added.
- Apocryphon 7mo agoMaybe they'll do something like what Anna’s Archive did
- krick 7mo agoIt's not that hard to make a mirror or arXiv. Basically, anybody who can pay for hosting (which, I suppose, isn't very cheap now when the whole world uses it). It's a problem to make users switch, because academia seems to have this weird tradition of resisting all practices that, god forbid, might improve global research capabilities and move forward the scientific progress. But then, if arXiv actually becomes unusable, I suppose they won't really have much choice than to switch? And, FWIW, I do think that arXiv truly has a vast potential to be improved. It is currently in the position to change the whole process of how the research results are shared, yet it is still, as others have said, only a PDF hosting. And since the universities couldn't break out of the whole Elsevier & co. scam despite the internet existing for the 30 years, to me, breaking free from the university affiliation sounds like a good thing. But, of course, I am talking only about the possibilities being out there. I know nothing about the people in charge of the whole endeavor, and ultimately in depends on them only, if it sails or sinks.
- tokai 7mo agoThis is exactly what happened last time when scientific publishing got cornered. Journals run by departments and research groups were spun out or sold off to publishers and independent orgs. And they continued to slowly boil the frog over 50 years with fees and gate keeping. Its especially problematic because while ArXiv love to claim to be working for open science, they don't default to open licensing. Much of the publications they host are not Open Access, and are only read access. So there is definitely the potential to close things off at some point in the future, when some CEO need to increase value.
- ryguz 7mo ago[flagged]
- lifeisstillgood 7mo agoI am sure it’s a dumb idea but why is there a problem for say the National Science Foundation or something to run a website that replicates ArXiv - if you are from an accredited university or whatever you can publish papers, fulfilling the “pdf store” function. Then getting peer reviewed is a harder process but one can see some form of credit on the site coming from doing a decent reviewers job. I suspect I am missing a lot of nuance …
- prepend 7mo agoThe moderation is difficult but not unprecedented. I think NIST hosts the CVE repo (through a contract to MITRE)
- Fomite 7mo agoGiven the last two years and what has been done to science funding, having a load bearing thing like ArXiv not housed with the U.S. government is, I think, pretty self-evidently a good idea.
- MetaMonk 7mo agohttps://youtu.be/4P5xSntVWQE https://youtu.be/4P5xSntVWQE
- jeremie_strand 7mo ago[flagged]
- Fomite 7mo agobioRxiv is already housed at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which is an independent non-profit.
- AccessScan 7mo agoGoing independent makes sense for arXiv. But the more interesting part is what it tells us about how we fund the stuff that actually keeps research moving. arXiv runs on about seven million dollars a year and handles hundreds of thousands of papers. That's roughly twenty bucks a paper. This is the backbone of how physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians share work. Traditional publishers charge thousands per article. The math is almost laughable. arXiv has never had an efficiency problem. The problem is that we've just accepted that something this important should survive on voluntary contributions and the occasional donation saving the day. Look at what happened with bioRxiv and medRxiv when they spun off into openRxiv. That only happened about a year ago. Nobody knows yet if it actually works long-term or if it just kicks the money problems down the road. But both platforms, totally separately, came to the same conclusion. We need to leave the university. That says something. Universities aren't built to fund outside infrastructure forever. Their budgets follow enrollment, grants, and endowment performance. That doesn't line up with the steady, predictable funding arXiv needs to keep the lights on. Ginsparg calling it a "Perils of Pauline" situation is probably the most honest thing anyone said about this. Everyone treats arXiv like it will always be there. But it's been one bad year away from serious trouble for most of its life. The real test for the nonprofit won't be the first few years. Cornell and Simons have that covered. It'll be five or ten years from now when the excitement fades and they're competing for donor money against whatever the next crisis in academic publishing turns out to be. The worry about AI-generated junk is actually where independence could help. A university-hosted arXiv could only spend so much on moderation tools. An independent org with a focused mission can make that a real budget priority. Whether they can keep up with the flood of low-quality submissions is a different question entirely.
- ide0666 7mo agoThe endorsement system is a real barrier for independent researchers. I've been trying to get endorsed for cs.NE for weeks — the work is published on aiXiv with video results, but without an institutional email or personal connection to an existing author, you're stuck. Glad to see arXiv thinking about independence — hope they also rethink access for non-institutional researchers.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- tamimy 7mo agoIt's quite interesting to see that a lot of opinions here think ArXiv will turn to shit because it will go "corporate". Are there any examples where this has not been the case?
- beezle 7mo agoI go back to xxx.lanl.gov days - that is, the beginning. Back then it was all physics, some math and a little quantitative finance (not bitcoin). And the quality was pretty good because it was a preprint archive. In fact, a headline from 2000: APS and BNL Host XXX e-Print Archive Mirror Feb. 1, 2000 The APS is establishing, in cooperation with Brookhaven National Laboratory, the first electronic mirror in the United States for the Los Alamos e-Print Archive. Today, from the landing page, it describes itself as "arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of [long list]. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv. Well, that's a large part of the problem. A lot of the stuff there now will never see a journal (even of dubious quality) and there is limited filtering of what new submissions will be stored. GIGO. Best thing ArXiv could do is go back to their roots - limit the fields and return to preprint only. Spin off the comp sci stuff for sure to someone else along with all its headaches. fixed: url
- pugchat 7mo ago[dead]