ArXiv's Updated Rate Limit Policy
blog.arxiv.org
blog.arxiv.org
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.
> 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.
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)
arXiv should ban these submitters.
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.
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.
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.
By the same principle, someone in the early 2000s could reasonably say "only weirdos date online", but the mainstream can shift also.
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.
But actually, thinking back, 10 years ago there may have been more of a stigma around a paper that was only on arxiv.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
google drive
Ref.:
[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.
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.
If https://weekinpapers.com is anything to go by, the number of _accepted_ submissions is now over 4000 per week.
I wonder what funding agencies are going to say about this.
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.
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 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?".