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And this is really how it should be. Honestly the only thing I want arxiv to do is become more like open review. Allow comments by peers and some better linking to data and project pages.

It works for physics because physicists are very rigorous. So papers don't change very much. It also works for ML because everyone is moving very fast that it's closer to doing open research. Sloppier, but as long as the readers are other experts then it's generally fine.

I think research should really just be open. It helps everyone. The AI slop and mass publishing is exploiting our laziness; evaluating people on quantity rather than quality. I'm not sure why people are so resistant to making this change. Yes, it's harder, but it has a lot of benefits. And at the end of the day it doesn't matter if a paper is generated if it's actually a quality paper (not in just how it reads, but the actual research). Slop is slop and we shouldn't want slop regardless. But if we evaluate on quality and everything is open it becomes much easier to figure out who is producing slop, collision rings, plagiarist rings, and all that. A little extra work for a lot of benefits. But we seem to be willing to put in a lot of work to avoid doing more work

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.

You may have delivered value in peer review, but on the whole, peer review delivers negative value. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

The arXiv vs journal debate seems a lot like 'should the work get done, or should the work get certified' that you see all over 'institutions', and if the certification does not actually catch frauds or errors, it's not making the foundations stronger, which is usually the only justification for the latter side.

I've noticed it's field dependent. Some fields don't really feel much need to publish in a real journal.

Others (at least in chemistry) will accept it, but it raises concern if a paper is only available as a preprint.

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.

That’s true. But that’s separate than the use in ML in Blockchain circles as a form of a marketing - using academic appearances.

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.

A Fields medal was awarded based mainly on this paper never published elsewhere: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0211159

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.

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.

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)

>Salaries in the US are so bonkers.

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.

Everyone outside the US doesn't deal with USD. Your comment is bonkers. Read up on purchasing power. All locations are not equal.

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.

Note that you are seeing an explicit tradeoff of different economic systems.

It's frankly not that crazy of a salary for an important executive position.

The city manager of a small city in Texas gets paid around that much and that's taxpayer money.

Now what collegiate football coaches are paid, that's pretty crazy.

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).

So is the living cost. Insurance, housing, etc. A better comparison is PPP.

Yes the obvious play is to move human labor to cheaper countries like France (including CEO of course).

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]

[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

$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.

It's a bit more complex than an S3 bucket though because the value comes from the reputation network, which can't really be replicated easily.

Though, saying that, I suppose all the reputation data is kind of public. Apart from emails/accounts.

+1, PageRank was taken from academia. They even cited it in their original work. Funny how the origins of these things get forgotten.

For everyone else,

The reason is because arxiv is growing significantly leading to 297,000 deficit in operating costs for 2025 alone. Corenell has helped with donation a long with other organizations that pay membership fees.

As a result, donors + leaders of arxiv think it's best to spin off to increase funding.

> 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/

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! "

>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.

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.

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 need to ask - the whole point is open access. https://info.arxiv.org/help/bulk_data.html

Lobsters has this I think. But it also means I've never posted there.

not a bad first order filter.

can you think of a better one?

Is this Gondor or Mordor?

> they'll just turn into a shitty journal at this point

To this end, they added an endorsement requirement this year: https://blog.arxiv.org/2026/01/21/attention-authors-updated-...

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 am using Zenodo for a while now instead. It is more user friendly, as well.

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.

there is. bioarxiv.

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.

Also the sources and has a very tame but useful pre-acceptance process.

Technically yes, socially no.

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.

I thought the X was an allusion to LaTeX.

Interesting, thanks for the context! Makes it more understandable as a choice.

> if you don't already know what it means or how you should read or say it

Google I'll grant you, though it's still pretty phonetic and easy to read. The other two not at all, they're incredibly well known instantaneously recognisable words.