The 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.
I 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).
Simply anticipating basic push backs from reviewers makes sure that you do a somewhat thorough job. Not 100% thorough and the reviews are sometimes frivolous and lazy and stupid. But just knowing that what you put out there has to pass the admittedly noisily gatekept gate of peer review overall improves papers in my estimation. There is also a negative side because people try to hide limitations and honest assessments and cherry pick and curate their tables more in anticipation of knee jerk reviewers but overall I think without any peer review, author culture would become much more lax and bombastic and generally trend toward engagement bait and social media attention optimized stuff.
The current balance where people wrote a paper with reviers in mind, upload it to Arxiv before the review concludes and keep it on Arxiv even if rejected is a nice balance. People get to form their own opinion on it but there is also enough self-imposed quality control on it just due to wanting it to pass peer review, that even if it doesn't pass peer review, it is still better than if people write it in a way that doesn't care or anticipate peer review. And this works because people are somewhat incentivized to get peer reviewed official publications too. But being rejected is not the end of the world either because people can already read it and build on it based on Arxiv.
The problem is that "optimizing for peer-review" is not the same thing as optimizing for quality. E.g., I like to add a few tongue-in-cheeks to entertain the reader. But then I have to worry endlessly about anal-retentive reviewers who refuse to see the big picture.
Currently a kind of rule of thumb is that a PhD student can graduate after approximately 3 papers published in a good peer reviewed venue.
If peer review were to go away, this whole academic system would get into a crisis. It's dysfunctional and has many problems but it's kinda load bearing for the system to chug along.
> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, ...
In my experience as a publishing scientist, this is partly because publishing with "reputable" journals is an increasingly onerous process, with exorbitant fees, enshittified UIs, and useless reviews. The alternative is to upload to arXiv and move on with your life.
Every field and every publisher has this issue though.
I've read papers in the chemical literature that were clearly thinly veiled case studies for whatever instrument or software the authors were selling. Hell, I've read papers that had interesting results, only to dig into the math and find something fundamentally wrong. The worst was an incorrect CFD equation that I traced through a telephone game of 4 papers only to find something to the effect of "We speculate adding $term may improve accuracy, but we have not extensively tested this"
Just because something passed peer review does not make it a good paper. It just means somebody* looked at it and didn't find any obvious problems.
If you are engaged in research, or in a position where you're using the scientific literature, it is vital that you read every paper with a critical lens. Contrary to popular belief, the literature isn't a stone tablet sent from God. It's messy and filled with contradictory ideas.
That sounds more like an issue of certain fields having crappy standards because the people in those fields benefit from crappy standards than an issue with the site they happen to host papers on.
The irony of the TBL quotes there being the entire problem with the semantic web is the ontological tarpit that results due to the excessive expressive power of a general triple store.
Well, I’d argue that many things in the semweb are not expressive enough and lead to the misunderstandings we have.
People think, for instance, that RDFS and OWL are meant to SHACL people into bad an over engineered ontologies. The problem is these standards add facts and don’t subtract facts. At risk of sounding like ChatGPT: it’s a data transformation system not a validation system.
That is, you’re supposed to use RDFS to say something like
The point of the namespace system is not to harass you, it is to be able to suck in data from unlimited sources and transform it. Trouble is it can’t do the simple math required to do that for real, like
?s :lengthInFeet ?o -> ?s :lengthInInches 12*?o .
Because if you were trying OWL-style reasoning over arithmetic you would run into Kurt Gödel kinds of problems. Meanwhile you can’t subtract facts that fail validation, you can’t subtract facts that you just don’t need in the next round of processing. It would have made sense to promote SHACL first instead of OWL because garbage-in-garbage out, you are not going to reason successfully unless you have clean data… but what the hell do I know, I’m just an applications programmer who models business processes enough to automate them.
Similarly the problem of ordered collections has never been dealt with properly in that world. PostgreSQL, N1QL and other post-relational and document DB languages can write queries involving ordered collections easily. I can write rather unobvious queries by hand to handle a lot of cases (wrote a paper about it) but I can’t cover all the cases and I know back in the day I could write SPAQL queries much better than the average RDF postdoc or professor.
As for underengineering, Dublin Core came out when I worked at a research library and it just doesn’t come close in capability to MARC from 1970. Larry Masinter over at Adobe had to hack the standard to handle ordered collections because… the authors of a paper sure as hell care what order you write their names in. And it is all like that: RDF standards neglect basic requirements that they need to be useful and then all the complex/complicated stuff really stands out. If you could get the basics done maybe people would use them but they don’t.
> and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos
arXiv has become a target for grifters in other domains like health and supplements. I’ve seen several small scale health influencers who ChatGPT some “papers” and then upload them to arXiv, then cite arXiv as proof of their “published research”. It’s not fooling anyone who knows how research work but it’s very convincing to an average person who thinks that that they’re doing the right thing when they follow sources that have done academic research.
I’ve been surprised as how bad and obviously grifty some of the documents I’ve seen on arXiv have become lately. Is there any moderation, or is it a free for all as long as you can get an invite?
This is great news for anyone building tools on top of arXiv data. The API (export.arxiv.org/api/) is one of the best free academic data sources — structured Atom feed with full abstracts, authors, categories, and publication dates.
I've been using it as one of 9 data sources in a market research tool — arXiv papers are a strong leading indicator of where an industry is heading. Academic research today often becomes commercial products in 2-3 years.
Bibliometrics reveal that they are highly cited. Internal data we had at arXiv 20 years ago show they are highly read. Reading review papers is a big part of the way you go from a civilian to an expert with a PhD.
On the other hand, they fall through the cracks of the normal methods of academic evaluation.
They create a lot of value for people but they are not likely to advance your career that much as an academic, certainly not in proportion to the value they create, or at least the value they used to create.
One of the most fun things I did on the way to a PhD was writing a literature review on giant magnetoresistance for the experimentalist on my thesis committee. I went from knowing hardly anything about the topic to writing a summary that taught him a lot he didn't know. Given any random topic in any field you could task me with writing a review paper and I could go out and do a literature search and write up a summary. An expert would probably get some details right that I'd get wrong, might have some insights I'd miss, but it's actually a great job for a beginner, it will teach you the field much more effectively than reading a review paper!
How you regulate review papers is pretty tricky. If it is original research the criterion of "is it original research" is an important limit. There might already be 25 review papers on a topic, but maybe I think they all suck (they might) and I can write the 26th and explain it to people the way I wish it was explained to me.
Now you might say in the arXiv age there was not a limit on pages, but LLMs really do problematize things because they are pretty good at summarization. Send one off on the mission to write a review paper and in some ways they will do better than I do, in other ways will do worse. Plenty of people have no taste or sense of quality and they are going to miss the latter -- hypothetically people could do better as a centaur but I think usually they don't because of that.
One could make the case that LLMs make review papers obsolete since you can always ask one to write a review for you or just have conversations about the literature with them. I know I could have spend a very long time studying the literature on Heart Rate Variability and eventually made up my mind about which of the 20 or so metrics I want to build into my application and I did look at some review papers and can highlight sentences that support my decisions but I made those decisions based on a few weekends of experiments and talking to LLMs. The funny thing is that if you went to a conference and met the guy who wrote the review paper and gave them the hard question of "I can only display one on my consumer-facing HRV app, which one do I show?" they would give you that clear answer that isn't in the review paper and maybe the odds are 70-80% that it will be my answer.
I exited academia for industry 15 years ago, and since then I haven't had nearly as much time to read review papers as I would like. For that reason, my view may be a bit outdated, but one thing I remember finding incredibly useful about review papers is that they provided a venue for speculation.
In the typical "experimental report" sort of paper, the focus is typically narrowed to a knifes edge around the hypothesis, the methods, the results, and analysis. Yes, there is the "Introduction" and a "Discussion", but increasingly I saw "Introductions" become a venue to do citation bartering (I'll cite your paper in the intro to my next paper if you cite that paper in the intro to your next paper) and "Discussion" turn into a place to float your next grant proposal before formal scoring.
Review papers, on the other hand, were more open to speculation. I remember reading a number that were framed as "here's what has been reported, here's what that likely means...and here's where I think the field could push forward in meaningful ways". Since the veracity of a review is generally judged on how well it covers and summarizes what's already been reported, and since no one is getting their next grant from a review, there's more space for the author to bring in their own thoughts and opinions.
I agree that LLMs have largely removed the need for review papers as a reference for the current state of a field...but I'll miss the forward-looking speculation.
Science is staring down the barrel of a looming crisis that looks like an echo chamber of epic proportions, and the only way out is to figure out how to motivate reporting negative results and sharing speculative outsider thinking.
> 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.
This just isn't true. arXiv is not a venue. There's no place that gives you credit for arXiv papers. No one cares if you cite an arXiv paper or some random website. The vast vast majority of papers that have any kind of attention or citations are published in another venue.
I think there is a misunderstanding here. Does arXiv count as a publication? Yes, pretty much anything that gives you a DOI does, for example Zenodo. Does it function as a reputable anything? No.
The paper you link to counts as a publication, but its reputation stands on its own, it has nothing to do with arXiv as a venue. Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't, just by publishing in certain venues your paper automatically gets a certain amount of reputation depending on the venue.
My observation is that research, especially in AI has left universities, which are now focusing their research to a lesser degree on STEM. It appears research is now done by companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tencent, Alibaba, among many others.
Universities (outside a few) just have much weaker PR machines so you never hear what they do. Also their work is not user facing products so regular people, even tech power users won't see them.
Not sure about that. How would a university test scaling hypotheses in AI, for example? The level of funding required is just not there, as far as I know.
Universities are also not suited to test which race car is the fastest, but that does not obviate the need for academic research in mechanical engineering.
Perhaps but the fastest race car is not possibly marshalling in the end of human involvement in science, so you might consider these of considerably different levels of meriting the funding.
There are a million other research things to do besides running huge pretraining runs and hyperparam grid search on giant clusters. To see what, you can start with checking out the best paper and similar awards at neurips, cvpr, iccv, iclr, icml etc.
This issue of accessibility is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, but it doesn’t mean that only large companies are doing good research.
Personally I think this resource mismatch can help drive creative choice of research problems that don’t require massive resources. To misquote Feynman, there’s plenty of room at the bottom
That's a specific field at a very specific time. In general there is a difference between research and development, you're going to expect the early work to be done in academia but the work to turn that into a product is done by commercial organizations.
You get ahead as an academic computer scientist, for instance, by writing papers not by writing software. Now there really are brilliant software developers in academic CS but most researchers wrote something that kinda works and give a conference talk about it -- and that's OK because the work to make something you can give a talk about is probably 20% of the work it would take to make something you can put in front of customers.
Because of that there are certain things academic researchers really can't do.
As I see it my experience in getting a PhD and my experience in startups is essentially the same: "how do you do make doing things nobody has ever done before routine?" Talk to people in either culture and you see the PhD students are thinking about either working in academia or a very short list of big prestigious companies and people at startups are sure the PhDs are too pedantic about everything.
It took me a long time of looking at other people's side projects that are usually "I want to learn programming language X", "I want to rewrite something from Software Tools in Rust" to realize just how foreign that kind of creative thinking is to people -- I've seen it for a long time that a side project is not worth doing unless: (1) I really need the product or (2) I can show people something they've never seen before or better yet both. These sound different, but if something doesn't satisfy (2) you can can usually satisfy (1) off the shelf. It just amazes me how many type (2) things stay novel even after 20 years of waiting.
I 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.
> 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
Even in the states, it’s more a distortion caused by the big tech centres. A software engineer in Ohio doesn’t command that kind of salary, but in San Francisco or Seattle that’ll buy you a moderately-senior engineer.
And while academic salaries are generally not great, tenured professors at big universities tend to make a fair bit (plus a lot more vacation time and perks than is normal in the US)
> A software engineer in Ohio doesn’t command that kind of salary, but in San Francisco or Seattle that’ll buy you a moderately-senior engineer.
On the other hand, a CEO of a well-known nonprofit might command that kind of salary in Ohio. People often underestimate how much the leaders of nonprofits pay themselves.
I'm not entirely convinced that this is entirely some sort of widespread bad behavior. Many non-profit boards conduct research on salaries and essentially size their organization and pay something akin to a market rate for the given size and scope.
However, even a small percentage of bad actors finding a way to inflate their salaries will, as a side effect, inflate salaries across the board because it influences the process that sets the salaries for the honest organizations.
Sure, but the cost of living there is significantly higher as well. Anyway, I can hardly even comprehend these kinds of sums, though I am a bit of an outlier, as I earn around $27,700 as an SWE in Europe, which is low even by the standards of companies in my own country.
The traditional definition of high income starts at 2x the median. Looking the US as a whole, anything above $125k should be considered high income. But it doesn't feel like that, because median wages are unusually low in the US relative to mean wages. Upper middle class salaries, on the other hand, have grown very high, and they have distorted people's perceptions. Even now, we are debating whether almost 5x the median should be considered high income.
Silicon Valley is the only place in the United States where $300K is even close to the "middle" of anything.
I just moved to SV a few months ago from the Midwest (and not a particularly cheap part of it). Telling my coworkers who aren't from the US what a house costs in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one who moved from a foreign country.
Not everywhere. Switzerland exists. Also cost of living is a thing so if anything US/CH just ramp up to match that. The rest of Europe has high CoL but terrible salaries. Asia has bad salaries but low CoL (on average).
According to swissdevjobs.ch[1], the top 10% salary for a senior software developer in Switzerland is 135,000 swiss franc; that's roughly $170,000 per year.
So if this is correct, then even in Switzerland, it seems like $300,000 per year would be an obscenely high salary for a senior developer.
Oh right, well it depends on CoL doesn't it? You can reframe European salaries as 'obscene' by world standards too. Both the US and Europe have totally broken and unaffordable housing markets, for example, but at least the Bay Area compensates with salary. I would say that relative to costs it's more that other salaries are obscenely low, if anything. People in Europe should be rioting, but unfortunately only the home owners are politically active.
Does cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters? Food delivery drivers? Or do those jobs command a six-figure salary too? If they can live comfortably in the city on a five-figure salary, maybe the argument that "cost of living is so high in SF that you can't live without a $300,000/year salary" is just a little bit overblown?
I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an apartment costs like $200,000 per year.
> Does cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters?
When I used to visit the Meta campus in Menlo Park, the QA folk I worked with were commuting 2 hours each way just to be able to afford housing. I've no idea how far away the janitorial staff must have lived to do the same
> I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an apartment costs like $200,000 per year.
Being able to afford unpredictable expenses and not have it bankrupt you. In the US, that would include healthcare. Everywhere in the world, that would be useful if you were laid off.
To build an emergency fund, you just need an income that's a bit higher than your expenses. If you earn $60,000 after tax per year, and spend $50,000 per year, you have a decent $10,000 emergency fund after one year and a massive $100,000 emergency fund after a decade. You don't need $300,000 per year to save.
You get by on a low salary by living with multiple people in the same apartment. Or you live far away and commute. Or both.
Not really a tenable long-term situation for a senior employee with plans to start a family. Family homes of decent size and area are literally millions of dollars.
> The cost of living is so high in part because so many have ridiculously high salaries
Bigger problem in the SF area is that a bunch of folks who owned property before the gold rush have ended up real-estate-rich, and formed a voting block that actively prevents the construction of new housing (on the basis that it might devalue their accidental real estate investment)
It's not about deserving, programmers just have enough market power to be able to choose to go elsewhere. Janitors and other more fungible employees do not.
Besides, I did already say that everyone else was underpaid relative to costs. But that's not unique to the Bay Area. Cost of housing relative to income is terrible in almost all of the major European cities too.
Once cities become wealthy enough to develop a home owning class, they seem to cease being able to provision adequate housing supply in general.
To some extent, maybe, but often not. For example, London has similar cost of living to the Bay Area, and when I was at Meta experienced folks like Dan Abramov over in London were making about the same as fresh college hires in Menlo Park...
Yeah I was talking more about the definition of obscene. Like is it obscene to make 300k if housing is so expensive? I say no, and that London salaries are just bad. Although it would be preferable to fix the housing market.
To be fair though, Dan specifically is kind of notorious for messing up his comp negotiation. Did you not see the Twitter pile on at the time?
The net salary in France might be low but the overall cost of hiring is quite high. Besides, why go to the middle when you can just find even cheaper places, if that's your prime metric?
The 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.
HAL 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.
Considering the value and prominence of arxiv to the world, this seems low to me. Although more importantly the rest of the staff needs to be well paid too, and if that's the ceiling its a bit concerning. It's crazy to me that people thought this was too high.
arXiv doesn't need much. All they do is host static pdfs uploaded by someone else with free CDN services from Fastly [0]. I'm sure they could get academics to volunteer moderation services as well.
In reality you could host the entire thing for well under $50k/year in hardware and storage if someone else is providing a free CDN. Their costs could be incredibly low.
But just like Wikipedia I see them very likely very quickly becoming a money hole that pretends to barely be kept afloat from donations. All when in reality whats actually happening is that its a ridiculous number of rent seekers managed to ride the coattails of being the defacto preprint server for AI papers to land themselves cushy Jobs at a place that spends 90+% of their money on flights and hotels and wages for their staff.
I'm already expecting their financial reports to look ridiculously headcount heavy with Personnel Expenses, Meetings and Travel blowing up. As well as the classic Wikipedia style we spend a ton of money in unclear costs [1].
Whats already sad is they stopped having a real broken down report that used to actually showed things. Like look at this beautiful screenshot of a excel sheet. Imagine if Wikipedia produced anything this clear. [2]
> arXiv doesn't need much. All they do is host static pdfs uploaded by someone else with free CDN services from Fastly [0]. I'm sure they could get academics to volunteer moderation services as well.
This just isn't true. arXiv nowadays has to deal with major moderation demands due to the influx of absolute drivel, spam, and slop that non-academics and less-than-quality academics have been uploading to the site.
Moderation for arXiv isn't perfect or comprehensive but they put so much work into trying to keep the worst of the content off their site. At this point while they aren't doing full blown peer review, they are putting a lot of work into providing first pass moderation that ensures the content in their academic categories is of at least some level of respectable academic quality.
$300k for a top executive position isn't especially high for anywhere in the US. That's around what the administrative director of a hospital would be making, which seems like a much smaller scope than leading ArXiv. For comparison, my roommate works for a non-profit that serves Philadelphia whose CEO's salary is $1.1 million. The CEO of the wikimedia foundation, which is similar in terms of role, has a salary of $450k. General average for US CEOs including for profits is around $800k and for large organizations tens of millions is not atypical.
Non-profits aren't maximizing stock value, but they do need to optimize for stakeholder value - you want to maximize the amount of money being donated in and you want to make the most of the donations you receive, both to advance the primary mission of the non-profit and to instill confidence in donors. This demands competent leadership. The idea that just because something is not being done for profit means the value of the person's contributions is worth less is absurd. So long as the CEO provides more than $300k of value by leading the organization, which might include access to their personal connections, then the salary is sensible.
When I was involved it was an x86 machine in a rack in Rhodes Hall.
I had a copy of the whole thing under my desk though in Olin Library on a Pentium 3 machine from IBM that was built like a piece of military hardware. In April the sun would shine in the windows of my office, the HVAC system was unable to cool my office, and temperatures would soar above 100F and I'd be sitting there in a tank top and drinking a lot of water and sports drinks and visitors would ask me how I could stand it.
The S3 API/UX/cost model is so seductively simple for static hosting though. I kind of think they deserve their ubiquity. Not on 90% of their products though.
I'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.
I 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.
Page 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.
It'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.
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.
The "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.
No, I mean that the pipeline requires software engineers to build/maintain, and salaries are (as in basically every tech organisation) the dominant cost
Make it an external service then, and leave the thing that's already working great to just be.
The reason authors like and use arxiv is that it gives 1) a timestamp, 2) a standardized citable ID, and 3) stable hosting of the pdf. And readers like the no-nonsense single click download of the pdf and a barebones consistent website look.
You have to keep in mind that an increasing portion of their time and labor is going towards moderation and filtering due to a mass influx of nonsensical AI generated papers, non-academic numerology-tier hackery, and other useless drivel.
Spinning the service off forces other the labor out onto other universities rather than leaving them to solely Cornell
Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs? I'm sure they can be offloaded to cold storage because most of that slop won't be opened by anyone.
Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. It needs minimal checks to remove overtly illegal content.
The PDF formatting is all but standardised. They ingest LaTeX sources, which is formatted according to the authors' whims (most likely, according to whatever journal or conference they just submitted the manuscript to).
I'll concede that the (relatively novel) HTML formatter gives paper a more uniform appearance. They also integrate a bunch of external services for e.g., citation metrics and cross-references. Still hard to justify such a high cost to operate, but eh.
Also, the "human review" is a simple moderation process [1]. It usually does not dig into the submission's scientific merits.
From my limited experience, arXiv appears to include many low-quality, unreproducible papers, and some are straight-up self-marketing rather than serious scientific work.
I 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.
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.
>They will spend it on anything but Firefox, which is the only thing anybody wants them to spend it on.
Mozilla certainly won’t spend it on Firefox, because the structure of the organization legally prohibits them from spending any of their donation money on Firefox. The ‘side projects’ are, at least officially, the real purpose of Mozilla.
They built the brand on Firefox then did a bait and switch. How many people who donate to Mozilla know that it's not helping Firefox?
But yeah, this is just how it works. Things can't stay good for too long. One must always be on the lookout for the new small thing that's not yet corrupted. Stay with it for a while until it rots, then jump to the next replacement.
And 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! "
We 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.
This 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?
> 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.
OpenAI 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.
Is your argument really that "OpenAI was an independent nonprofit corporation and it worked out great, Arxiv will remain just as non-profit as OpenAI"?
No, my argument is that OpenAI could make billions of dollars if they converted from a non-profit to a for-profit, and they only succeeded after years of effort and because they had already structured the company into separate for-profit and non-profit entities. And even after all this, the non-profit still controls the majority of the for-profit entity.
So if OpenAI with billions of dollars only partially succeeded at converting to a for-profit business, then that suggests that organizations with fewer resources (like arXiv) have much worse odds.
What 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.
As 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.
And 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.
This 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.
Now 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.
>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.
I 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?
They 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.
I'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.
arXiv 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.
With 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.
they'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.
"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.
The 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/ ). 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.
It 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.
It 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.
It 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.
Well, 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.
The 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.
Frankly, 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.
Very 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.
I 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
It'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.
everyone has a first time they see a thing and don't yet know what it is.
Using a brand as a filter where you have to already know what it means to get it is exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to achieve.
Consider the most exclusive (successful) brands that exist. Even there, where exclusivity is a brand goal, none of them have this property of being obscure on first contact.
You usually get introduced to it by your academic supervisor or collaborators as a masters or PhD student. If you're a solo researcher who has made a significant contribution on the frontier of science, I'm sure you'll be able to understand how Arxiv works as well. Because I assume you have had some conversations with other experts in the field. If you're a full on autodidact with no contact to any other researchers in the field, well, maybe it's better if you chat with some other people in that field.
Its reasonable to have a tradeoff here to avoid cranks and now AI psychosis slop. You can still post on research gate and academia.edu or you own github page or webhosting.
I've never even connected the 'X' to the Greek letter chi. I just kinda accepted it as one of many groovy web 2.0 misspellings in search of a domain and trademark.
It's a classic story of someone having to pick a name quickly, which then gets established long before anyone who cares about branding is aware of its existence.
The original service didn't even have a name, only a description, and it was amusingly hosted at xxx.lanl.gov. But LANL wasn't really interested in it, and the founder eventually left for Cornell. At that point, the service needed a domain name, but archive.org was already taken.
And besides, the name has Ancient Greek influences. A similar Latinate term might be something like "archive".
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/
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).
The current balance where people wrote a paper with reviers in mind, upload it to Arxiv before the review concludes and keep it on Arxiv even if rejected is a nice balance. People get to form their own opinion on it but there is also enough self-imposed quality control on it just due to wanting it to pass peer review, that even if it doesn't pass peer review, it is still better than if people write it in a way that doesn't care or anticipate peer review. And this works because people are somewhat incentivized to get peer reviewed official publications too. But being rejected is not the end of the world either because people can already read it and build on it based on Arxiv.
The problem is that "optimizing for peer-review" is not the same thing as optimizing for quality. E.g., I like to add a few tongue-in-cheeks to entertain the reader. But then I have to worry endlessly about anal-retentive reviewers who refuse to see the big picture.
If peer review were to go away, this whole academic system would get into a crisis. It's dysfunctional and has many problems but it's kinda load bearing for the system to chug along.
Others (at least in chemistry) will accept it, but it raises concern if a paper is only available as a preprint.
In my experience as a publishing scientist, this is partly because publishing with "reputable" journals is an increasingly onerous process, with exorbitant fees, enshittified UIs, and useless reviews. The alternative is to upload to arXiv and move on with your life.
I've read papers in the chemical literature that were clearly thinly veiled case studies for whatever instrument or software the authors were selling. Hell, I've read papers that had interesting results, only to dig into the math and find something fundamentally wrong. The worst was an incorrect CFD equation that I traced through a telephone game of 4 papers only to find something to the effect of "We speculate adding $term may improve accuracy, but we have not extensively tested this"
Just because something passed peer review does not make it a good paper. It just means somebody* looked at it and didn't find any obvious problems.
If you are engaged in research, or in a position where you're using the scientific literature, it is vital that you read every paper with a critical lens. Contrary to popular belief, the literature isn't a stone tablet sent from God. It's messy and filled with contradictory ideas.
*Usually it's actually one of their grad students
But yes it’s a people problem, not an arxiv problem.
It is an interesting instance of the rule of least power, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power.
People think, for instance, that RDFS and OWL are meant to SHACL people into bad an over engineered ontologies. The problem is these standards add facts and don’t subtract facts. At risk of sounding like ChatGPT: it’s a data transformation system not a validation system.
That is, you’re supposed to use RDFS to say something like
The point of the namespace system is not to harass you, it is to be able to suck in data from unlimited sources and transform it. Trouble is it can’t do the simple math required to do that for real, like Because if you were trying OWL-style reasoning over arithmetic you would run into Kurt Gödel kinds of problems. Meanwhile you can’t subtract facts that fail validation, you can’t subtract facts that you just don’t need in the next round of processing. It would have made sense to promote SHACL first instead of OWL because garbage-in-garbage out, you are not going to reason successfully unless you have clean data… but what the hell do I know, I’m just an applications programmer who models business processes enough to automate them.Similarly the problem of ordered collections has never been dealt with properly in that world. PostgreSQL, N1QL and other post-relational and document DB languages can write queries involving ordered collections easily. I can write rather unobvious queries by hand to handle a lot of cases (wrote a paper about it) but I can’t cover all the cases and I know back in the day I could write SPAQL queries much better than the average RDF postdoc or professor.
As for underengineering, Dublin Core came out when I worked at a research library and it just doesn’t come close in capability to MARC from 1970. Larry Masinter over at Adobe had to hack the standard to handle ordered collections because… the authors of a paper sure as hell care what order you write their names in. And it is all like that: RDF standards neglect basic requirements that they need to be useful and then all the complex/complicated stuff really stands out. If you could get the basics done maybe people would use them but they don’t.
arXiv has become a target for grifters in other domains like health and supplements. I’ve seen several small scale health influencers who ChatGPT some “papers” and then upload them to arXiv, then cite arXiv as proof of their “published research”. It’s not fooling anyone who knows how research work but it’s very convincing to an average person who thinks that that they’re doing the right thing when they follow sources that have done academic research.
I’ve been surprised as how bad and obviously grifty some of the documents I’ve seen on arXiv have become lately. Is there any moderation, or is it a free for all as long as you can get an invite?
I've been using it as one of 9 data sources in a market research tool — arXiv papers are a strong leading indicator of where an industry is heading. Academic research today often becomes commercial products in 2-3 years.
Bibliometrics reveal that they are highly cited. Internal data we had at arXiv 20 years ago show they are highly read. Reading review papers is a big part of the way you go from a civilian to an expert with a PhD.
On the other hand, they fall through the cracks of the normal methods of academic evaluation.
They create a lot of value for people but they are not likely to advance your career that much as an academic, certainly not in proportion to the value they create, or at least the value they used to create.
One of the most fun things I did on the way to a PhD was writing a literature review on giant magnetoresistance for the experimentalist on my thesis committee. I went from knowing hardly anything about the topic to writing a summary that taught him a lot he didn't know. Given any random topic in any field you could task me with writing a review paper and I could go out and do a literature search and write up a summary. An expert would probably get some details right that I'd get wrong, might have some insights I'd miss, but it's actually a great job for a beginner, it will teach you the field much more effectively than reading a review paper!
How you regulate review papers is pretty tricky. If it is original research the criterion of "is it original research" is an important limit. There might already be 25 review papers on a topic, but maybe I think they all suck (they might) and I can write the 26th and explain it to people the way I wish it was explained to me.
Now you might say in the arXiv age there was not a limit on pages, but LLMs really do problematize things because they are pretty good at summarization. Send one off on the mission to write a review paper and in some ways they will do better than I do, in other ways will do worse. Plenty of people have no taste or sense of quality and they are going to miss the latter -- hypothetically people could do better as a centaur but I think usually they don't because of that.
One could make the case that LLMs make review papers obsolete since you can always ask one to write a review for you or just have conversations about the literature with them. I know I could have spend a very long time studying the literature on Heart Rate Variability and eventually made up my mind about which of the 20 or so metrics I want to build into my application and I did look at some review papers and can highlight sentences that support my decisions but I made those decisions based on a few weekends of experiments and talking to LLMs. The funny thing is that if you went to a conference and met the guy who wrote the review paper and gave them the hard question of "I can only display one on my consumer-facing HRV app, which one do I show?" they would give you that clear answer that isn't in the review paper and maybe the odds are 70-80% that it will be my answer.
In the typical "experimental report" sort of paper, the focus is typically narrowed to a knifes edge around the hypothesis, the methods, the results, and analysis. Yes, there is the "Introduction" and a "Discussion", but increasingly I saw "Introductions" become a venue to do citation bartering (I'll cite your paper in the intro to my next paper if you cite that paper in the intro to your next paper) and "Discussion" turn into a place to float your next grant proposal before formal scoring.
Review papers, on the other hand, were more open to speculation. I remember reading a number that were framed as "here's what has been reported, here's what that likely means...and here's where I think the field could push forward in meaningful ways". Since the veracity of a review is generally judged on how well it covers and summarizes what's already been reported, and since no one is getting their next grant from a review, there's more space for the author to bring in their own thoughts and opinions.
I agree that LLMs have largely removed the need for review papers as a reference for the current state of a field...but I'll miss the forward-looking speculation.
Science is staring down the barrel of a looming crisis that looks like an echo chamber of epic proportions, and the only way out is to figure out how to motivate reporting negative results and sharing speculative outsider thinking.
This just isn't true. arXiv is not a venue. There's no place that gives you credit for arXiv papers. No one cares if you cite an arXiv paper or some random website. The vast vast majority of papers that have any kind of attention or citations are published in another venue.
The paper you link to counts as a publication, but its reputation stands on its own, it has nothing to do with arXiv as a venue. Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't, just by publishing in certain venues your paper automatically gets a certain amount of reputation depending on the venue.
Good riddance! But not relevant in the least.
Personally I think this resource mismatch can help drive creative choice of research problems that don’t require massive resources. To misquote Feynman, there’s plenty of room at the bottom
You get ahead as an academic computer scientist, for instance, by writing papers not by writing software. Now there really are brilliant software developers in academic CS but most researchers wrote something that kinda works and give a conference talk about it -- and that's OK because the work to make something you can give a talk about is probably 20% of the work it would take to make something you can put in front of customers.
Because of that there are certain things academic researchers really can't do.
As I see it my experience in getting a PhD and my experience in startups is essentially the same: "how do you do make doing things nobody has ever done before routine?" Talk to people in either culture and you see the PhD students are thinking about either working in academia or a very short list of big prestigious companies and people at startups are sure the PhDs are too pedantic about everything.
It took me a long time of looking at other people's side projects that are usually "I want to learn programming language X", "I want to rewrite something from Software Tools in Rust" to realize just how foreign that kind of creative thinking is to people -- I've seen it for a long time that a side project is not worth doing unless: (1) I really need the product or (2) I can show people something they've never seen before or better yet both. These sound different, but if something doesn't satisfy (2) you can can usually satisfy (1) off the shelf. It just amazes me how many type (2) things stay novel even after 20 years of waiting.
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 …
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
And while academic salaries are generally not great, tenured professors at big universities tend to make a fair bit (plus a lot more vacation time and perks than is normal in the US)
On the other hand, a CEO of a well-known nonprofit might command that kind of salary in Ohio. People often underestimate how much the leaders of nonprofits pay themselves.
However, even a small percentage of bad actors finding a way to inflate their salaries will, as a side effect, inflate salaries across the board because it influences the process that sets the salaries for the honest organizations.
It's a fun problem.
Sure, but the cost of living there is significantly higher as well. Anyway, I can hardly even comprehend these kinds of sums, though I am a bit of an outlier, as I earn around $27,700 as an SWE in Europe, which is low even by the standards of companies in my own country.
I just moved to SV a few months ago from the Midwest (and not a particularly cheap part of it). Telling my coworkers who aren't from the US what a house costs in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one who moved from a foreign country.
So if this is correct, then even in Switzerland, it seems like $300,000 per year would be an obscenely high salary for a senior developer.
[1]: https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries/all/all/Senior
Even if we scope it to SWE, I don't think that's far off the US percentiles.
In London I imagine the top 10% SWE is not even 100k GBP. In Germany even worse.
I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an apartment costs like $200,000 per year.
When I used to visit the Meta campus in Menlo Park, the QA folk I worked with were commuting 2 hours each way just to be able to afford housing. I've no idea how far away the janitorial staff must have lived to do the same
Being able to afford unpredictable expenses and not have it bankrupt you. In the US, that would include healthcare. Everywhere in the world, that would be useful if you were laid off.
Not really a tenable long-term situation for a senior employee with plans to start a family. Family homes of decent size and area are literally millions of dollars.
Bigger problem in the SF area is that a bunch of folks who owned property before the gold rush have ended up real-estate-rich, and formed a voting block that actively prevents the construction of new housing (on the basis that it might devalue their accidental real estate investment)
Besides, I did already say that everyone else was underpaid relative to costs. But that's not unique to the Bay Area. Cost of housing relative to income is terrible in almost all of the major European cities too.
Once cities become wealthy enough to develop a home owning class, they seem to cease being able to provision adequate housing supply in general.
To some extent, maybe, but often not. For example, London has similar cost of living to the Bay Area, and when I was at Meta experienced folks like Dan Abramov over in London were making about the same as fresh college hires in Menlo Park...
To be fair though, Dan specifically is kind of notorious for messing up his comp negotiation. Did you not see the Twitter pile on at the time?
It's still the land of opportunities. It's easier to find ways to reduce your living costs than ways to increase your salary.
It is actually quite common to come across HAL in subfields of mathematics in my experience.
Can you elaborate on that?
arXiv does not need to and should not optimize for “shareholder value”, which is at least nominally the justification for outlandish CEO pay packages.
In reality you could host the entire thing for well under $50k/year in hardware and storage if someone else is providing a free CDN. Their costs could be incredibly low.
But just like Wikipedia I see them very likely very quickly becoming a money hole that pretends to barely be kept afloat from donations. All when in reality whats actually happening is that its a ridiculous number of rent seekers managed to ride the coattails of being the defacto preprint server for AI papers to land themselves cushy Jobs at a place that spends 90+% of their money on flights and hotels and wages for their staff.
I'm already expecting their financial reports to look ridiculously headcount heavy with Personnel Expenses, Meetings and Travel blowing up. As well as the classic Wikipedia style we spend a ton of money in unclear costs [1].
Whats already sad is they stopped having a real broken down report that used to actually showed things. Like look at this beautiful screenshot of a excel sheet. Imagine if Wikipedia produced anything this clear. [2]
[0] https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/18/faster-arxiv-with-fastly/
[1] https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/FY26_Budget_Public.pdf
[2] https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/2020_arXiv_Budget.pdf
This just isn't true. arXiv nowadays has to deal with major moderation demands due to the influx of absolute drivel, spam, and slop that non-academics and less-than-quality academics have been uploading to the site.
Moderation for arXiv isn't perfect or comprehensive but they put so much work into trying to keep the worst of the content off their site. At this point while they aren't doing full blown peer review, they are putting a lot of work into providing first pass moderation that ensures the content in their academic categories is of at least some level of respectable academic quality.
Non-profits aren't maximizing stock value, but they do need to optimize for stakeholder value - you want to maximize the amount of money being donated in and you want to make the most of the donations you receive, both to advance the primary mission of the non-profit and to instill confidence in donors. This demands competent leadership. The idea that just because something is not being done for profit means the value of the person's contributions is worth less is absurd. So long as the CEO provides more than $300k of value by leading the organization, which might include access to their personal connections, then the salary is sensible.
Though, saying that, I suppose all the reputation data is kind of public. Apart from emails/accounts.
It’s even less. I would bet if it’s not now, for the vast majority of its life it was a machine at someone’s desk at Cornell.
I had a copy of the whole thing under my desk though in Olin Library on a Pentium 3 machine from IBM that was built like a piece of military hardware. In April the sun would shine in the windows of my office, the HVAC system was unable to cool my office, and temperatures would soar above 100F and I'd be sitting there in a tank top and drinking a lot of water and sports drinks and visitors would ask me how I could stand it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most people I talk to hate that pipeline and spend a lot of debug hours on it when Arxiv can't compile what overleaf and your local latex install can.
The reason authors like and use arxiv is that it gives 1) a timestamp, 2) a standardized citable ID, and 3) stable hosting of the pdf. And readers like the no-nonsense single click download of the pdf and a barebones consistent website look.
All else is a side show.
Spinning the service off forces other the labor out onto other universities rather than leaving them to solely Cornell
Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. It needs minimal checks to remove overtly illegal content.
Also, the "human review" is a simple moderation process [1]. It usually does not dig into the submission's scientific merits.
[1] https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/index.html
I've contracted into some consultancy teams which you could uncharitably describe as "15 people and $4mn/yr to create one PDF per month".
Any change to the basic premise will be a negative step.
They should just be boring quiet unopininionated neutral background infrastructure.
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.
Ladybird continues to have the appearance of making progress, fwiw:
https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-02-28/
Mozilla certainly won’t spend it on Firefox, because the structure of the organization legally prohibits them from spending any of their donation money on Firefox. The ‘side projects’ are, at least officially, the real purpose of Mozilla.
But yeah, this is just how it works. Things can't stay good for too long. One must always be on the lookout for the new small thing that's not yet corrupted. Stay with it for a while until it rots, then jump to the next replacement.
"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! "
Exactly. It should be a utility. Not quite dumb pipe, but not too far either.
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?
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.
So if OpenAI with billions of dollars only partially succeeded at converting to a for-profit business, then that suggests that organizations with fewer resources (like arXiv) have much worse odds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
arXiv is doomed. It was nice while it lasted.
I wonder when they will introduce the algorithmic feed and the social network features.
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.
> 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
It's probably not perfect but in practice, it seems to have been enough to get rid of the worst crackpotty spam.
can you think of a better one?
Oh, wait.
another will need to rise to take its place.
To this end, they added an endorsement requirement this year: https://blog.arxiv.org/2026/01/21/attention-authors-updated-...
I am wary of that. IMO the business model is damaged therein. You can say in 2022 we had 27; bankrupt in 2030.
People keep falling into the same trap. They love monopolies, then are shocked when those monopolies jerk them around.
Everything published on arXiv could also be published on Zenodo, but not the other way around.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Using a brand as a filter where you have to already know what it means to get it is exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to achieve.
Consider the most exclusive (successful) brands that exist. Even there, where exclusivity is a brand goal, none of them have this property of being obscure on first contact.
Its reasonable to have a tradeoff here to avoid cranks and now AI psychosis slop. You can still post on research gate and academia.edu or you own github page or webhosting.
The original service didn't even have a name, only a description, and it was amusingly hosted at xxx.lanl.gov. But LANL wasn't really interested in it, and the founder eventually left for Cornell. At that point, the service needed a domain name, but archive.org was already taken.
And besides, the name has Ancient Greek influences. A similar Latinate term might be something like "archive".
Isn't that actually kindof a good brand signal for a repo of very specialized papers? "Fun with learning" in comic sans wouldn't help credibility.