ArXiv's Updated Rate Limit Policy

bryan0

some highlights: > In September of 2016, arXiv received 9,869 submissions. In September of 2024, arXiv received 20,569 submissions. This September, arXiv received 40,363 submissions, which in turn generated almost 9,000 support tickets for arXiv staff and moderators. > arXiv now limits submitters to up to two submissions per calendar month, with a limit of three total active submissions at any given time.

the__alchemist

Nice writeup and the policy is a step in the right direction. I suspect simple rate-limit measures like this will be a big improvement. I suspect a logical conclusion Arxiv and elsewhere may be an identity management system with an aggressive filter, and shared blacklists. I suspect that classifying people as spam/slop-submitters, then banning them (or whatever identity they used; name, email, name + organization etc), applying incremental rate limits over the general one, may be required.

move6729

This will just force high SNR Posters to other platforms. ArXiv is rate limiting itself out of relevance.

kiwih

As an academic and regular submitter to arXiv, this is an eminently sensible policy. I like that it's per-submitter and not per-author, that means that the big labs with large collaborations shouldn't be terribly put out (more authors = more submission budget). I hope something like this could also be adopted for some of our larger conferences - the absolute limits on co-authorship are what seem to cause the most grumbles.

bonoboTP

Arxiv papers are not supposed to signify anything. The only reason that people may derive some kind of career benefits is because Google Scholar indexes it and counts it towards the h-index etc. All that metric-based career-optimization going on is quite broken anyway, so this is fixing things from the wrong end as well. (The better end: stop hiring and promoting people based on Arxiv paper counts, so there is no incentive to flood it) The hosting cost side I can understand, though they received quite some funding recently, but I assume it's not going towards actually running the site, but to who knows what broader impacts and so on. Moderation for Arxiv is a silly idea. It already shouldn't be taken as a quality signal that something is able to be up on Arxiv. Obviously they should remove illegal stuff, but beyond that, requiring moderation is a misunderstanding of their role and reason for popularity. If hosting is too expensive, I guess an alternative aggregator could also arise. With just metadata and a hash of the pdf that can be hosted anywhere, and as the sumbitter, if you move the file, you can change the URL. The main reason for Arxiv's existence is the timestamping and the easy referencing. (Though I admit that the stable hosting is also a pretty important part, but they mention moderation effort as the reason, not the hosting costs.) Academia is losing sight of the forest for the trees, can't see more than an arm's length ahead of their noses.

lhk931122

There may be great researchers who work on several papers in a month, but even with this rule they can just split them and submit to arxiv, so I think it is very reasonable. AI slop is everywhere now (and also increasing), and I think this fast and forceful action by arxiv is effective at stopping this wave of slop.

totetsu

It seems there is a lot of this kind of AI risk. I'm trying to find the right label for it. Something that was a common good, that worked at a human scale, is now made unviable because automation has pushed it beyond what it can handle and still be useful.

paulpauper

publish everything on zenodo for timestamp/priority and then slowly integrate to arxiv

vzaliva

In my experience, ArXiv has become too slow to publish. My previous paper took weeks to be approved. It was a recommended path for journal submission (posting to a public repository and submitting a link), and after waiting a long time, I just posted it on hal.science instead, and it was up in a day. Another one of mine has been on hold for 18 days and counting. I think it is a great service to the community, but clearly they are having a scalability problem.